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Times Online - Comment

Where can liberty turn? Charles Clarke is now to make lawful whatever he says is lawful

“NO FREEMAN shall be arrested or detained in prison or deprived of his freehold or outlawed or exiled or in any way molested . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers.” Magna Carta, 1215.

It is near incredible than in 2005 ministers of the Crown should need reminding of Magna Carta. There is only one question after yesterday’s decision of the Home Secretary in effect to repeal it. How can he be stopped?

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Where else can civil liberty turn? The law is no good. It was the supreme court, the law lords, who told the Government its internment of foreigners was unlawful. Mr Clarke now means to reverse that decision by making lawful whatever he says is lawful. Such is the thin ice on which freedom skates.

The only bulwark that remains is one we never thought to welcome, the ramshackle agglomeration of cronyism and heredity that is the House of Lords. No constitutional evolution has been more remarkable under Labour than the revival of this place, given a new lease of legitimacy by Mr Blair’s half-hearted reform. He may have appointed twice as many peers a year as any of his recent predecessors, but they have shown little gratitude. The Government is defeated in the Lords more often that at any time in the past quarter century.

It must be defeated again. Mr Clarke and Mr Hain want to railroad detention without trial through the Commons in six days. They will doubtless succeed. The Lords is made of stronger stuff. If it can vote against hunting it can surely vote against the control orders until the election. If the measure is reintroduced by a new government, the Lords should go on defeating it until the Parliament Act is invoked. If this is to be the last deed of old House of Lords, I cannot imagine a nobler baronial epitaph than to die fighting for the Great Charter against a dictatorial Crown.