The Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels said “... how short-sighted it is to entrust any political matter whatever to the jurists...” The non-political civil servants of the German Justice Ministry were insisting on following the correct legal process in the Grynszpan case even in the darkest hours of Nazi power in the early 1940s, frustrating to an extent at least the politically motivated illegal plans of Goebbels.
It is certainly difficult for English human rights lawyers to imagine the contemporary UK Ministry of Justice taking such a protective role towards the law, not to mention the Home Office or indeed the rest of the government and civil service. The Home Office seems fit to be awarded the first prize in law breaking.
The modern or contemporary right-wing idea of the Rule of Law seems to be for a US President Donald Dock who lost the elections to incite his supporters to illegally trespass and occupy the Capitol in Washington - the lame-d[u]ck Donaldinho Trumputzkin Dump (the family was originally called Dummkopf) who scores an own goal in the Donald Duck democracy where Scrooge McDuck counts the votes in dollars long before the ballot box.
The UK equivalent is the government minister responsible for law and order, the Right Con Lady Dracula, Vicecountless of Drownings, Frau Obergruppenführer Rottweiler (no offense meant to real Rottweilers), the Phantom of the Operations, the bigot witch, the goddess of destruction and death, the matron saint and defender of despots and dictators, not exactly looking like a mistress in an old master painting and lacking their benefit of silence as the late Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, knowledgeable in both types of mistresses, might have remarked, making a speech that inspires her supporter to attempt to assault or murder an officer of the court (maybe that has something to do with a job opening for a speechwriter for the Home Secretary, meanwhile advised by the law firm Hook Line & Sinker, Solicitors, of Petty England) or WTF Solicitors.
Not to mention the Crime Minister himself laughing and chatting to a friend with criminal convictions, without expressing any disapproval of his friend intending to have a journalist beaten up for intimidation after writing an unflattering piece, a new concept of prime suspect - of the dishonorable society of Gray's Inquiry, Borister-at-Law!
Why Tory party members thought that the leader they voted for was fit to run the country is maybe best known to themselves, not to mention people who voted for the Tory party in the 2019 elections.
Maybe after getting rid of human rights law and planning law, criminal law can go next, not that governments of both major parties have had much difficulty in routinely breaking even existing laws - left, right, left, right - the politicians march to defeat the law. Yet we continue to trust the "poodles of the executive" who facilitate the government law breaking to legislate.
The authoritarian officials and even some judges, Grim Reapers, enforce the dead hand of process (the death sentence still exists de facto in the wild western immigration courts, for example, by disbelieving a refugee and condemning them to a return to certain death in their country of flight).
Dead Hand, also known as Perimeter, was a Cold War-era automatic nuclear weapons-control system that was used by the Soviet Union. Indeed, the two immigration detention centres in Gatwick are very fittingly on Perimeter Road.
The detention centres in Heathrow are on Colnbrook Bypass, maybe in honour of the government’s practice of seeking to bypass the law. Harmondsworth detention centre is doubtless named after the harm to its residents worth so much profit to the companies who run it connected to politicians in a modern corruption that would make third-world countries blush. (Colnbrook detention centre seems more inexplicably named other than the one improverished Buddenbrook heir or spare who sometimes goes there...)
Penguin Books was based in Harmondsworth. The Home Office efforts of flying away foreigners does sometimes resemble a penguin's flight. The wing structures of penguins are evolved for swimming, rather than flying in the traditional sense. Penguins swim underwater at speeds of up to 15 to 25 miles per hour, another shared characteristic with the fast and low sinking Home Office (no offense meant to real penguins, indeed there is very little real about the Home Office).
Croydon is known to be somewhat colder than areas around it. No wonder the Home Office is based there but even then it can be even colder inside the Home Office than outside in Croydon.
That was all just warming up to the present British government has recently tried to decriminalise torture – getting Lexit done.
A lawyer is professionally not allowed to knowingly mislead a court. A politician seems to be professionally required to knowingly mislead the people.
Indeed the biggest crooks are in politics (left, right and centre), government and big business (plus quam imperfectum). The Marquis de Sade as a true Platonic philosopher aristocrat wrote about them in a letter to a friend in 1783:
By what right does this pack of leeches – which laps up the people's misfortunes, and which by its outrageous monopolies plunges this unfortunate class (whose sole crime is to be weak and poor) into the cruel necessity of losing either its honour or it's life, and in the latter case leaving it no other choice than to lose it through poverty or on the scaffold – what right, I ask you, do these monsters have to demand virtues?
Machiavelli described them thus (to note the substantial difference between the fine aristocrat and the oligarch, the latter is described here - emphasis added):
But to make plain what I mean when I speak of gentlemen, I say that those are so to be styled who live in opulence and idleness on the revenues of their estates, without concerning themselves with the cultivation of these estates, or incurring any other fatigue for their support. Such people are very mischievous in every republic or country... men of this sort are the sworn foes of all free institutions.
The Marquis de Sade like Machiavelli may not quite have as positive a reputation as they may deserve, especially Machiavelli seems to be too often read like the Devil reads the Bible, but John Phillips in his introduction to Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, says of the noble and learned Marquis:
If we are to sum him up, we might call Sade an arch-cynic, a questioning voice determined to unpick the threads of all self-righteous orthodoxies, to deflate pomposities and expose inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
One might say that both the Marquis de Sade and Machiavelli were truly open minded and interested in the truth rather than ideological dogmatism into which many even clever people seem to fall too often. Sade flirted with the revolution but like many love affairs it was maybe first fire and then only ashes left (like the Italian Prince di Salina described marriage in Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa). One might call the synthesis of their thoughts Sadomachiavellism.
Emiliano Zapata said that '[i]t is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.'
Richard Strauss called Goebbels a pipsqueak. Now we have a pigsqueak.