Granted that the people are educated to the appreciation of their purpose, they serve to draw attention, as attention needs to be drawn, to the fact that vigilance is essential in the realm of what Cromwell called fundamentals.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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My own years of residence in the United States have convinced me that there is a real value in Bills of Rights which it is both easy, and mistaken, to under-estimate.
Certain principles, freedom of speech, protection from arbitrary arrest, and the like, are regarded as especially sacred.
Another institutional mechanism for the safeguarding of freedom is that of a Bill of Rights.
On the contrary, the British system, where the executive may be at any moment destroyed by the legislature as a penalty for error or wrong, where, also, there lies always the prospect of an immediate and direct appeal to the people as the…
Independence makes for antagonism and antagonism, in its turn, makes for confusion.
No clear policy emerges upon which the electorate can form a straightforward judgment.
The latter can make its own schemes; where its views, more, where its party complexion, are different from his, there is a constant tendency to paralysis of administration.
Where mistakes are made, where there is corruption, or dishonesty, or abuse, it can be brought home forthwith to its authors.
The British system, in which the executive, as a committee of the legislative, formulates its plans for acceptance or rejection, has, I think, the clear advantage of showing the electorate exactly where responsibility for action must lie.
I accept, therefore, the traditional notion that the separation of the judicial from the executive power, the right of the former to determine the legality of executive decision, is the basis of freedom.
Anything less than this seems to me a wanton abuse of freedom; and, mutatis mutandis, this type of safeguard seems to me urgent wherever a Minister is given a discretionary power which affects the liberty of the subject.
I should like, therefore, to see the possibility of an appeal from the decision of the Home Secretary to a judge in chambers where the latter would, on a case stated by the Department, hear such evidence as the applicant chose to bring for…
Anyone who wishes to give testimony in a case of this kind ought surely to prove his bona fides by submitting to cross-examination by the applicant or his representative.
No person ought to be condemned by accusations he is not given the opportunity to refute.
It seems to me that this power to deny admission to citizenship, as it is exercised, is a complete denial of natural justice.
There has accreted today about the departments of state a type of discretionary power which seems to me full of danger unless it is exercised under proper safeguards.
I can see no reason in the world why, like any other body serving the public, it should not be responsible for the torts of its agents.
The right to sue the state in tort seems to me quite fundamental to freedom.
And we must remember that, however great be the good will of the public services, what, to them, may seem a simple matter of administrative routine, may be to the citizens involved a denial of the very substance of freedom.
But one wants to be certain that in arriving at his decision the expert has been compelled to take account of all the relevant evidence; that the parties to his decision have had their day in court.
No body of civil servants, however liberal-minded they may be, ought to be free both to make the law and to devise the procedure by which its legality may be tested; and that, be it remembered, without a power of appeal from their decision.
I regard the growth of delegated legislation as both necessary and desirable; but if it is not gravely to impair our freedom, it should, I think, be developed only under the amplest safeguards.
But I think we have grave reason for fear when the growth of this delegated legislative authority is accompanied with, or followed by, the conference of powers upon government departments themselves to determine the question of whether the…
It seems to me, therefore, that we must so organize the method of judicial promotion as to prevent the executive from choosing men of its own outlook, and, further, see to it that appointment to the Bench is definitely taken as the end of…
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
