For Our Own Protection

The court of appeal has ruled that there should be no "irreducible minimum" of information which the Government should be obliged to disclose about its reasons for placing people under house arrest. On the other hand, such people should be protected from "significant injustice" as far as is possible within the parameters of what the Government deems convenient to itself. "There are no rigid principles," said the court, reflecting British values at their most eternal. "What is fair is essentially a matter for the judge", whose job it is to interpret the law as drafted on the back of Agent Smith's envelopes and hustled through Parliament by the usual cabal of the hidebound, the spineless, the paranoiac and the opportunistic. When someone is under twenty-four-hour surveillance, when their human contacts are strictly limited and carefully watched, when their access to the internet and other forms of communciation is severely restricted or cut off altogether - clearly, in such circumstances, giving them any clue as to what they might have done to deserve such treatment would be a terrorists' license to kill.