Elective Dictatorship moves a stage nearer ...

The charge of threatening democracy in Britain is made too often by opponents of the party in power when they don't like what the government is doing. Certainly it has been made very frequently against Tony Blair. But as with the story of the boy who cried wolf, one of the main reasons we should be careful not to make the charge too frequently is the risk that people will not listen when it is true.

I hope that justifiable concerns about what today's arrest of suspected terrorists and extreme measures against an apparent threat of mass aircraft bombings does not completely divert attention from the measures the government has just put forward about defence lawyers.

The government has slipped out in August, when Blair himself and half the country is on holiday, the proposal that judges should be able to sack defence lawyers. Doubtless they hope that people will not realise how serious this is, and that anyone who speaks up against it will be assumed to be interested in defending criminals rather than their victims. That would be a huge mistake.

One of the key safeguards which protects people who really are innocent from arbitrary misuse of power is that we have a legal system based on the principle that being accused is not the same thing as being guilty.

For centuries it has been a principle of our laws that a man (or woman) is innocent until proven guilty. I have no doubt that too many people who were as guilty as hell used this to get away with their crimes, but it has also given many people who really were innocent a chance to prove it.

If we don't plan to lock up innocent people, they must have access to good legal advice, and defence laywers must have the opportunity to make a nuisance of themselves. Once you start down the line of allowing judges to sack a defence lawyer, you are starting to fatally compromise the safeguards which keep Britain a free society in any meaningful sense of those words.

I don't say this because I have anything against judges, the vast majority of whom are honourable and capable people. It's not that I don't trust judges with the power to sack defence lawyers, I don't trust anyone other than the defendant with that power.

A few brave journalists, bloggers, and especially brave MPs recently fought an important battle to modify a law which would have given ministers the power to rewrite laws without reference to Parliament. That was an important battle, but the fight to defeat the government on giving judges the power to sack defence lawyers is even more important. If the government wins on this one, liberty in Britain will not be safe.