Letter: What justice? (1992)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

What justice?

Dear Editors,

“What Makes You Angry?” (Socialist Standard, July). I do not know whether responses were anticipated to such an open question, but I certainly feel able to throw in my twopenny worth.

The system under which we all exist, live, prosper and exploit (in that order) angers me constantly. The system is an evil joke played upon humanity, where success at one end of the scale is measured by the amount of poverty and suffering at the other.

I believe it was Balzac who remarked that “behind every great man is a crime”, or words to like effect, and it is true, if crime is defined as causing suffering and deprivation through greed and wanton cruelty.

Civilised society is merely a facade, the icing on a cake consisting of the following ingredients: selfishness, theft, murder; yes, even murder! After all let us remember that murder has not always been a capital offence. In Saxon times, the penalty for murdering a labourer was about £10, a bishop cost you £60, and an archbishop would set you back about £180. In fact, with the exception of regicide, you could pay in cash for most malefactions.

Inequalities in the way justice is administered enrage me. In the light of Guildford, Birmingham, Kiszko, and the remainder of Lord Lane’s whipping boys, what happened to Habeas Corpus, the presumption of innocence, and the burden of proof? Were they conveniently forgotten in the haste to secure convictions for undeniable atrocities. And why aren’t the West Midlands rabble in prison instead of voting for the return of public executions, the tumbril cart, and the Tyburn Tree, when each week people who are unable to pay their poll tax are carted off to gaol amid harsh condemnation from the bench?

Why do people like Anthony Blunt get offered immunity from prosecution for offences against the Official Secrets Act, allowing them to continue their bourgeois lives, in exchange for a few names and dates?

And last, but by no means least, why is Lord Lane allowed to retain his title in spite of the damage he has done in the name of British Justice?

David Hinchcliffe,

Accrington

Reply:

“British Justice" has always been what it is today: an arm of the state machine which exists to defend the interests of the ruling class at home and abroad. Nor could it be anything else since, as Kropotkin once pointed out, the whole system of law courts and prisons is essentially only “organised vengeance called justice”.

Editors.