Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, on the new idea of super-Asbos

”a half-baked gimmick’ the Government is now suggesting using a system designed to deal with young tearaways to tackle international criminal rackets run by the Tony Sopranos of this world. It is based on a lazy view that the only way to fight crime is to circumvent the criminal justice system.”

Telegraph

Tim Worstall

I’m sure this will come as a surprise to the barrister who is currently our Prime Minister. There’s a reason that the standards of proof in civil and criminal cases are different. Civil cases are, for the most part, two citizens arguing with each other. The law is there, in all its Solomonic majesty, to arbitrate between the different claims.

Criminal cases are where the State, with all its might, resources, police, money, prisons and guns, deliberately attempts to take away the freedoms and liberties of an individual for transgression of the law.

That’s why we have different standards, see? Reasonable doubt in one, balance of probabilities in the other. We don’t take away those freedoms on the basis of the balance of probabilities: it took us a few hundred years to work it out but we got there in the end. Banging someone up because we think, but cannot prove, that they are a naughty boy just isn’t how to spread sweetness and light across a society. Indeed, it’s one of the attributes of an oppressive State that such could even be contemplated, let alone re-introduced into the system.