Sunday, January 15, 2006

What's Wrong With David Cameron

Yep, last week was another classic one for British justice. Actually, the BBC is downplaying the extent of the victim’s injuries – the bloke has been left missing parts of his brain and skull, so badly brain-damaged that he has no real ability to remember anything. What this is, is an example of sheer contempt for the public at large – not just the assailant, the judge as well.

There are plenty of issues which split the nation – this isn’t one of them. It doesn’t matter whether you ask Joe Bloke sitting in a Labour club in a former pit village, or you ask Sir Tristian Duckfield at the Trumpton Hunt Ball, they’ll tell you that this sentence is a disgrace. At risk of stating the obvious, judicial independence was supposed to mean independence from undue interference by the other two arms of government, not that the judiciary should exists as some kind of free-floating Liberal la-la land.

What’s happened to our justice system is a perfect microcosm of what the L3 would like to happen to Britain as a whole. The philosopher kings on the bench, conjuring up whatever spurious arguments are needed to justify pushing the L3 agenda are the very epitome of Liberalism. Liberals believe in the ability of the elite – who, amazingly, turn out to be folks just like them – to bring about a new golden age. The L3 will admit that things haven’t always worked out so far, but that’s only because they haven’t been given enough power. After all, a total transformation of society demands total power. This is why the L3 are so antagonistic to concepts such as objective legal principles, religion or democratic accountability: all limit the ability of the elite to impose their views on the world.

Equally, this is the antithesis of what Conservatism is about. But now we’ve got David Cameron giving the store away. Cameron doesn’t have any issues with the idea of an out of control elite, just as long as he’s part of it. Say what you like about Princess Tony, but he was a Liberal pushing Liberalism. Cameron is far worse: he’s actually conceding the debate to the Left. So now the 90% of the population that think that a guy who beats a man until he’s badly brain-damaged might be the sort of person we’d rather not have on the street find themselves effectively disenfranchised.

That’s what’s wrong with Cameron, and that’s why a Conservative victory could be worse than another defeat. Whatever tactical changes Cameron may make, he has swallowed whole the Liberal metacontext. Blair was always enough of a realist always to conceal his Liberalism behind blather about being ‘tough on crime’, but now by surrendering the whole debate to the L3, Cameron could, by default, manage the almost impossible and make Liberalism look credible.

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