Justice and the State.

Helena Kennedy in the Grauniad is full of good sense. I think she has actually got it, noted the greatest damage that is being done to us, to our freedoms and liberties, the changes in the Rule of Law:

In government rhetoric, the criminal process is disingenuously described as a contest between the citizen-victim and the criminal. What is actually taking place is the rebalancing of power towards the state. In a culture where we are all encouraged to think of ourselves as potential victims of criminals or terrorists, we easily forget that the state is capable of victimising us more effectively.
The mistake government ministers make is that they think they are "the state" and, since they are all nice folk, any concern about "thin ends of wedges" is dismissed as intemperate. The myth is that the modern state is benign: dictatorial methods are deemed unsustainable in western democracies and we should therefore be prepared to revisit legal principles created when democracies were more fragile. By the same logic, civil libertarian objections are seen as outmoded, the product of a different political reality.
Debates about "new legal regimes" have been gaining momentum since the 1980s. Authoritarians in the US and here believe that the criminal standard of proof is too high, that an accused should be required to prove his or her innocence, that juries are inefficient, uneconomic and irrational. The conviction rate, they argue, should be the measure of success, even if there is some collateral damage in the form of wrongful convictions. Pre-emptive detention should also be possible where there is risk of offending. In many of these areas of possible change the US is inhibited by its constitution, but the UK knows no such restraint.

What so many of the modernists, the modernisers, have managed to forget is that the law is not there to protect us from each other. Every society, including those that coalesced into the UK, has had and has a series of common laws (no, not the Common Law, but a series of generally accepted rules) to deal with murder, robbery, burglary, inheritance, etc etc blah blah blah. We might call them traditional law. That they have been codified, changed occasionally by statute, brought up to date, that is not what underlies that grand experiment which is our near 1,000 year history of the Common Law. All of the things that are being changed, the right to silence, jury trials, the burden of proof, self-incrimination, all the things that are being swept away in this legal revolution, they were not fought for over the centuries to protect us from each other. No, they were fought for so that we, the people, should be protected from the caprices of those in power. It does not matter who those in power are, the Monarchy, aristocracy, Puritans, the demos, the mob, the State. These rules, these checks and balances are there to protect us from them.
One might quote the Samizdata guys and point out that the state is not your friend. Or refer you to Tim at An Englishmans Castle  who found, only days ago, that his only defense from the inane demands of the State was the local bench of magistrates, those unpaid repositories of common sense that is the lowest level of our judiciary (and something that Nu Labour wants to replace with paid minions). Or, roughly quoting from Robert Bolt and a Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas Moore to his secretary, "Would you cut down all the laws of England to pursue the devil? And when you have, and the devil turns on you, where will you hide?"
The point of it all is and was to keep us free from those who would rule us and that is exactly what is being eroded, to the detriment of exactly that freedom.