Just when you thought it was safe to go and walk the streets of Britain again, it turns out that Abu Qatada has been let out on bail - with a 16 hour curfew - by a senior immigration judge. Cue much frothing of the mouth in the Torygraph, which reports that it is going to cost the UK £5 million a year to monitor his activities.
I have no time for Mr Qatada and his ridiculous views - he reminds me of an Islamic (and more sinister) version of Sir Roderick Spode, P.G. Wodehouse's fabled leader of the Blackshorts - and clearly this country would be better off without him. The sooner he is on a plane the safer we will all be.
But there is one snag, namely the rule of law. If you believe in the rule of law, you have to accept that it protects people you don't like as well as those you do. It grates that Mr Qatada, who doesn't believe in democracy or the rights of the individual, should take advantage of liberties the kind of society he wants to construct would not extend to you and me; but that's the rule of law for you. It doesn't discriminate between one person's value and another; in fact it recognises that discriminating will always be subjective. And subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
Actually we should be grateful for good laws which protect the likes of Qatada, because it is becoming increasingly clear that there are some very bad ones which don't. In Kent yesterday some idiot has been arrested for posting a picture of a burning poppy online, with the caption "How about that you squadey (sic) ****s". This is the latest in a long line of incidents where the police have arrested and sometimes tried individuals under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 for posting messages or images which are "grossly offensive".
The MCA started life as a worthy piece of legislation intended to deal with threatening or poison pen letters, but it was amended by Labour in 2001 to cover electronic communications, and here's where the trouble originates. I read somewhere that just about any idea worth stating will at some point have been grossly offensive to someone - it's not hard to see that if Darwin had published The Origin of Species online he could have been prosecuted under the MCA. Actually there will be people somewhere in Britain today who find Darwin's theory grossly offensive, and that is rather the point.
The MCA as amended assumes that people have a right not to be grossly offended. They don't; or at least they shouldn't have. Because if they do, it forces us to decide what is grossly offensive and what isn't. And that is a matter of opinion, of the police in the first instance and ultimately of judges and juries. As soon as you make opinion the foundation of law you have chucked away freedom. As I said, subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
So much bad jurisprudence arises out of failure to apply existing laws sensibly. John Terry and Anton Ferdinand should both have been prosecuted under the Public Order Act. The POA, a statute that has been around in one form or another for over a century, makes it an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause violence. If the young toe-rag had burned a poppy at a Remembrance Day parade, the POA could have been used against him. Online, the State needs to grow up and amend the MCA.
