ABSTRACT
A range of conclusions can be drawn from this study. The main propositions, with some pertinent examples, can be stated as follows:
1. Legal neutrality is a myth. Alongside murder, the offences examined in this book are the most serious in the criminal law. They exist, and are administered, to defend the existing state structure and socio-economic order against perceived political threats. Lord Chief Justice Holt may have expressed this role crudely in R v. Tutchin, when he said: ‘If people should not be called to account for possessing the people with an ill opinion of the government no government can subsist’ (see Chapter 6). Nevertheless, that is the approach that has generally prevailed to this day. Instructing the jury in the trial of Henry Hunt and other organisers of the fatal 1819 St Peter’s Fields meeting, a British judge said the banners carried by participants, objecting to ‘taxation without representation’ and being ‘sold like slaves’ were evidence of a seditious conspiracy and unlawful assembly. ‘Is the telling a large body of men they are sold like slaves likely to make them satisfied and contented with their situation in society?’ he asked rhetorically (see Chapter 1). In a 1962 decision, the English House of Lords judges ruled that, as a matter of law, the ‘interests of the State’ are determined exclusively by the government of the day, at least where the issues at stake concern the deployment of the armed forces (see Chapter 5).
