Detention without trial. posted by Richard Seymour

Michael Howard is back - and he's pissed off. He's got the hump that the courts are doing their job by refusing to allow the government to run roughshod over the law: what he calls "judicial activism" .

The issue revolves around some curious idea that the government have got into their heads about detaining people without trial. As Gary Younge notes , present and past versions of such policies have not been terribly successful at catching terrorists or even inconveniencing them: quite the contrary. But what they have done is ensured a lot of innocent people spent time locked up, some of whom were subjected to the various old-fashioned tortures that made Britain great before the yanks came with their S & M shit.

And there's the usual axe-grinding about the Human Rights Act. All because it obliges the courts to give serious consideration to whether proposed laws are actually proportionate to their intended effect. Because a sense of proportion is the last thing you want in politics, isn't it?

Yet one more episode in which the Tories act as a junior branch of the present government while the judiciary seems to be functioning as the official opposition.