The “choppy seas of the culture wars”are creating an increasing dependence on authority, a human rights barrister has said.
The culture wars have “produced a very choppy environment where people are so uncertain about what things mean that they hold certain things very dear and are scared to depart from them,” Loutfi said.
“This creates huge amounts of opportunity for power hungry thugs to gain ascendancy, because they can always promise certainty.”
She said the “thugs” can promise people they will be “absolutely fine” so long as they stick to a certain received opinion on a given issue, and they could be sanctioned or punished for deviating or questioning the opinion.
As a result, people will “stick to very solid received opinions, and they will look to authorities to tell them what those opinions should be,” she said, adding that it’s the “antithesis” of how contractual agreements are worked out.
While free speech advocates often argue the highly polarised environment is stopping people from voicing their opinions, Loutfi believes the problem is “more insidious.”
English Legal System About Working Out Solutions
The Bad Law Project was set up by Reclaim Party leader Laurence Fox last year to “litigate on behalf of victims of bad law,” which he has defined as “political ideology masquerading as law.“The group is currently supporting a number of cases, including Reclaim Party MP Andrew Bridgen’s defamation suit against former Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Bridgen, formerly a member of the Conservative Party, is the most vocal critic of the government’s COVID-19 response and the COVID-19 vaccines. He was kicked out of the party over a now-deleted Twitter post, in which he shared an article on the vaccines, adding, “As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the holocaust.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the language in the post was “unacceptable” and that he was “determined that the scourge of anti-Semitism is eradicated.”
Hancock, who was health secretary until June 2021, said Bridgen’s remarks were “disgusting, anti-Semitic, anti-vax conspiracy theories“ that were ”not only deeply offensive but anti-scientific and have no place in this House or in our wider society.”
Loutfi said they are also launching a project on behalf of parents who want to take legal action against schools over the teaching of the transgender ideology.
Loutfi said the aim of the project is to “take the politics out of law,” as well as educating the public on what the law is.
Unlike the continental civil law system, English common law, which originated from a contractual system, relies heavily on precedent.
Rather than trying to “work out the full gamut of human problems and all of the possible solutions in a volume or in a code,” English common law “works on the assumption that human beings are infinitely complex,” Loutfi said.
And that means in the civil arena, she argued, law is very often not adversarial, but about “creating spaces” where people can workshop problems and arguments and reach compromises where possible.
Loutfi believes the most valuable asset in the English legal system is the idea that Parliament and the courts are spaces of debate, where solutions are worked out, and where “public consensus can be carefully built.”
“And our public square, including social media platforms should, I think, take very seriously the idea that we’re here to hammer out agreements, we’re not here to identify enemies and shoot them on sight,” she said.
