You have to be justice if you want justice

I've been thinking about the depths of corruption that individuals and governments can descend to. Not pleasant thoughts for someone who didn't sleep well at all last night.

I've also been thinking about how much I put my trust in other people. Politicians. Bureaucrats. People.

Then I chatted with my youngest daughter, and I said this: "Where is the justice in it? Where?"

She fixed me with a measuring stare and replied: "The people are justice. It is not merely something outside them. It is in them. You have to BE justice if you want justice."

I could only think "WOW!"

I also thought, "That is it. It is that. All the individuals in the history of the united kingdom have made the law what it is. Many of them have striven to give birth to justice, to be fair, to be even-handed, to remedy the hurt that one person can deal another.

It is inside us. That's what I've been feeling all along. How absolutely wrong I've felt. How twisted up and how I wanted to shriek "That is not right. You cannot do these things. You don't understand," and I have tried to explain and reason and tell and demonstrate. I believe that this is the nature of women and it is held against us because, as is pointed out by Baroness Helena Kennedy in her excellent book 'Eve was Framed' Eve was not part of the law-making brigade. Law was made up by men.

Now, we abide by laws because we are good little ladies (mostly) trying to please our other halves, our fathers, our brothers, our police and all the other men who have contributed to our lives. Yet, those men can be wrong. Laws can be poor laws. Men are frightened and weak and prone to desiring to control the uncontrollable world (to be fair and even-handed so are some women).

Laws can be wrong. Men who make them can be wrong. They can mistaken. Or they can be rotten and corrupt. But, throughout history, the law is, was and ever shall be 'us'.

We uphold it. We pander to it. We complain about it.

There is another law. There is the law of rightness. That absolutely uncompromising feeling or persistent thought or still small voice or loud yelling screeching voice that never lets you forget when something is WRONG.

Changing the law as it is to mold human beings to your will no matter what they say, how they protest, how they reason, how they are consulted, how they yell in anger is simply wrong.

The legal principle of calling someone innocent until he or she is proven - beyond a shadow of a doubt or beyond reasonable doubt - to be guilty has passed our internal censor. It has stood the test of time immemorial. It has the force of custom, of fairness, the odour of violets and the approval of consciences far and wide.

The next principle - Nemo judex in causa sua - is neatly summed up in Latin; the all-but-moribund language that still can dance and sing so lyrically. The phrase means 'No one shall be a judge in his own cause'. In other words, no one can judge a case in which he or she is party or in which he or she has an interest (Duhaime.org)

It is a principle in natural justice, and underlies the doctrine of reasonable apprehension of bias. It states that someone who has a bone to pick with someone else cannot try the someone else and be unbiased.

It's like being judged in your divorce suit by your hostile mother-in-law who will decide how much money you're going to get off her precious son who has never, in her eyes, done anything wrong.

Judges who have an interest in a case recuse themselves. They disqualify themselves. They might declare a vested interest. They should do this to answer the call of fairness in themselves.
They cannot judge without bias if they have something to gain or lose in the case decision.

Graham Badman did not recuse himself. Ed Balls did not ask for fairness or even-handedness or care enough about basic principles that most people live by: he does not deserve to be in such an elevated position and in charge of so many vulnerable people.

It is wrong.

No mangling of parlous words dreamed up by slimy-souled men in grey pinstripe suits can alter whether or not something is right or wrong. They can only confuse and confound your brain. They cannot subvert that part of you, the knowing part of you, that recognises the truth and the right.

Home educators are correct to refuse to be confused and confounded. They are correct to say no to the gamesplaying and the endless drumbeat of unprincipled men.

We are right to believe that we are right for we uphold justice. They - the pinstriped - have lost their way. They are soon to crash and burn in their flight because we are justice. We are the just. The right.

We are justice.

We have to be justice if we want justice.