On Tuesday the 1st of July Charles Moore’s Telegraph Column carried the headline, “Only Motorists are told to own their own problems”.
Readers of this column who, like Charles Moore have completed a Considerate Driver Course instead of paying a speeding fine, will immediately guess the direction his column then took. Every reason you may have for breaking the speed limit is an excuse, and this is because the underlying principle behind driving laws, is that you are responsible for your actions. It is not potholes, cyclists, other drivers, hidden road signs, rain, snow, noisy kids, or funerals. All these are excuses; You alone stand responsible for what your vehicle does.
The law is based on the notion that humans have Free Will. Thus, only you decide how the vehicle is controlled. You can plead that mitigating factors can affect your decisions. Notwithstanding this, the Court determines whether those factors are personal excuses or justifiable reasons.
Although the underlying principle of Traffic Law is that we are responsible for our actions, this does not necessarily apply in some new laws. Recently, parliament granted ’Protected Characteristics’ status to some minority groups and these groups are now protected from words or actions such as hatred or discrimination, as being a violation of that protected characteristic. The one with protected status can make a complaint of Discrimination or Hateful words to the Police.
Furthermore, because the law assumes the complainant is a Victim the police are obligated to concur with this definition and so the perpetrator becomes ‘the Accused.’
A problem then exists, because as a Victim defined by law can do nothing about his situation, therefore only the Accused can be deemed responsible for his actions.
Many see dangers to freedom of speech by this legal conflation of rights, facts, and assumptions and we already see restrictions on everybody who does not have a special protected status. However, because the idea of protected characteristic is now established in the legal lexicon, it is shortly to be used to grant protected status to some religious ideas.
It is my view, as Christian, to grant protection to abstract thought, philosophies and a transcendental theology will open an apocalyptic Pandora’s box. The only winners will be ‘Human Rights Lawyers.
They will have created a new secular heaven without a benign absolutist law giving God. Their relativist heaven will however be a hellish nightmare for those Victims of the Taxation required to pay for it. It will also be a constant reminder of the old saying that, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
This situation reminds me of the two Kings of Barataria in the G&S Operetta The Gondoliers. They were keen Republicans and, like many today had plans to create a World Order based on the secular philosophies of Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and Marx.
They, however, never saw what the ultimate expression of their ideas would look like. However, God saw it. Likewise, George Orwell.
As lawyers continue adding protected characteristics, everything from abstract thoughts, ideas, speech, and actions will be protected and thus unchangeable. This could invoke public despair but …… Don Alhambra in the Gondoliers also saw it and so he sang a ditty about a fictitious King of old.
That King, although no one denies his heart was of abnormal size.
Yet he’d have acted otherwise if he himself had been acuter.
The end is easily foretold, When every blessed thing you hold is made of silver or of gold you long for simple pewter.
When you have nothing else to wear, But cloth of gold and satins rare, For cloth of gold you cease to care up goes the price of shoddy.
In short, whoever you may be, To this conclusion you’ll agree, When everyone is somebodee, Then no one’s anybody!
Likewise, today,
When everybody’s a helpless Victim; everybody will be an accused Perpetrator.
View from the Pew 