Who's Law Is It, Anyway?

          The other day, I found a million-pound banknote. It was a spoof, of course. Nor did I really ‘find’ it: I picked it up from where it had been deliberately and conspicuously placed to draw attention to itself, on top of a low wall. From a distance, it looked like a tenner folded into a transparent plastic pouch. When I picked it up, I saw that there was also a small pebble in there, on one side of which was written HEBREWS 4:12-13 and on the other side of which were four unfamiliar characters (Hebrew, perhaps?). Quick as a flash, I deduced that I had fallen for the oldest advertising trick in the world, an appeal to the base human instinct of greed. I reacted by turning the tables, with a mental sneer at the Godly proselytisers who had stooped so low as to use such inducement as they themselves must surely scorn in favour of spiritual riches. Besides, I thought, if you want to convert someone to your way of thinking, it’s not a good start to make them feel foolish.

          Still, curiosity got the better of me and I looked up the Biblical reference, an assertion that “nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight”, the implication being that you had better observe His laws or burn in hell. This is predicated, of course, on the acceptance of there being such a thing as God. But it also, tellingly, reflects the megalomaniacal tendencies of Earthly autocrats. And that, in turn, makes sense of Robert A. Heinlein’s observation, “Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child”. The conclusion I draw from this is that there’s always someone who wants to control everyone else and the surest way to do that is through fear, spiritual or temporal. I had one last attempt, however, at the God question. I followed a link to a professorial dissertation, which turned out to be a painful exercise in casuistry intended to prove the existence of God by not providing any empirical evidence (well, there isn’t any, after all). But I soon tired of this vortex of illogicality and abandoned the text in favour of Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling and a bottle of decent Gigondas.

          There endeth my respect for the laws of God: but, as to the laws of the land, it is more nuanced. On Monday, I got caught up in the aftermath of a protest at the Government’s agreement to renew licenses for fossil-fuel extraction. Once upon a time (pre-Johnson/Patel) the right to protest (peacefully) was upheld by the law. Now, I can report, the undermining of that right is fully under way. I sat in Walworth police station for five hours, serving time on rota in support of nine protestors who had been taken into custody, some for being merely in the vicinity of the action. Typical of the charges was “conspiracy to destroy/damage property of unknown value”, something that I hope will be difficult to prove subsequently in court, but which has been passed into law anyway, if only as a handy way of getting protestors off the street and away from the oxygen of publicity. It has long been apparent to me that British law rests firmly, not on the rights of human beings, but on the defence of private property, a fact vividly illustrated during my recent visit to the former penal colony of Sydney where, until 1840, Britons were sent if their death sentences for the crime of theft were mercifully commuted to transportation.

          Perhaps if the law was concentrated more on the protection of citizens from harm, there would be a better chance of our not burning in a real hell of our own creation.