Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.
Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.
My point is that the police definitelly “can be arsed to enforce certain laws in full” if the right people tell sufficiently highly placed people in the right police force to enforce them strictly.
This is called “selective enforcement” and is definitelly the kind of shit you see in countries were Rule Of Law is weak, like Latin American dictatorships.
The system is designed with overbroad laws with lax enforcement exactly so that even though the actual law as written is draconian, common people don’t normally get hit by it so they don’t feel it is draconian, yet at the same time when the “right” people desire it they can make enforcement go from lax to strict against specific people or groups of people who thus get hit by the draconian elements of the law.
What you wrote is a great example of how those laws are de facto fine for most people most of the time because in their own life they never see the law applied to its full extent and thus many will even form a positive opinion of those laws because as long as the enforcement of those laws is lax and doesn’t include the most draconian provisions, those laws work fine (or don’t even get used, so they’re not seen as a problem)
Meanwhile the laws can be applied in a strict way and to their full extent, so people in positions of power can arbitarilly (and I emphasise “arbitrarilly” because it’s the very opposite of how Justice should be applied) order it to be used with full force against specific targets, which is exactly what Starmer is doing now with some of the crazier anti-Terror legislation in the books.
Selective enforcement turns Law Enforcement into a weapon which can be pointed at the enemies of people with sufficient power.
Proper Justice Systems try very hard to avoid selective enforcement situations because that’s are the very antithesis of “Everybody is treated the same in the eyes of the Law” (i.e.“The Law is blind”) core principle in Justice - everybody is not treated the same in the eyes of the Law when a political figure can tell the Met Commissioner and the CPS to “throw the book at these specific demonstrators” and those demonstrators are then arrested and charged using elements of certain laws which nobody else ever has applied against them.