MPs seek to overturn ruling that stops police being sued for failings

A member of parliament wishes to shield the constable from the citizen’s suit, and his colleagues mean to take the shield away. I confess I read the matter twice, thinking I had misread it the first time.

Here is the plain arithmetic of it. A trade that cannot be sued for bad work soon does bad work. The printer who may libel with impunity libels; the cooper who may sell leaky barrels sells them. This is not philosophy, it is the observation of any man who has kept a shop. Accountability is not a punishment visited on the tradesman - it is the whetstone that keeps the edge. Take it away and the blade dulls, however fine the steel.

Now the honest counterargument, which I must state fairly or be a partisan fool: an officer sued at every misstep may grow timid, and a timid constable is of small use against a bold thief. There is truth in it. But the remedy proposed - that dishonesty and fabricated evidence enjoy the same shelter as honest error - confuses two very different goods. A man who trips deserves forbearance. A man who trips and swears he was pushed deserves the magistrate’s full attention. To wrap both in one blanket is to teach the second man that lying is a kind of clumsiness.

The parliamentarians, it seems, agree, and mean to trim the blanket. Good. I only note how long the trimming took, and how many citizens paid for the delay.

I am an old man and have been governed by worse, so my astonishment is modest. But I remark that every institution I ever helped raise - the fire company, the library, the watch - improved in exact proportion as its mistakes could be named aloud and paid for. Silence is cheap in the short ledger and ruinous in the long one.

Let them amend it, then measure whether the thieves grow bolder. That is the whole experiment, and it costs nothing but honesty to run.

A curious business, this: parliamentarians roused to action not by the fabrication of evidence, not by the dishonesty of constables, but by the inconvenience of a court having noticed these things. The strongest case for the status quo deserves stating, because it deserves stating before it is buried. The police, it is said, must make split-second decisions under conditions of chaos and danger; if every honest error exposes the officer to ruinous litigation, the result will be a force of the timid and the hesitant, and the criminal will be the principal beneficiary. This is a serious argument, made by serious people, and I do not mock it. Hesitation in the face of a knife is not a vice.

But notice what the MPs are actually defending. Not the split-second decision. Not the honest mistake under pressure. They are defending the fabricated statement, the doctored notebook, the lie told calmly in a witness box years after the event, with time to consult, to reflect, and to choose. The distinction between the error and the lie is the whole of the matter, and the legislation before us is constructed precisely so as to blur it. One might as well argue that because surgeons must cut quickly, they must never be answerable for operating on the wrong patient while sober and unhurried.

There is a further insult embedded here, and it is directed at the citizen. The message is that the apparatus of the state may manufacture evidence against you, and your sole remedy is to hope the same apparatus disciplines itself. We tried that arrangement in various places and various centuries. The findings are in.

A constable who errs in a crisis has my sympathy and the law’s protection. A constable who lies has neither, and should learn that he has neither.

That is the whole of the reform. It requires one sentence.

Some men in Parliament want to keep a shield over the police. A court said a person wronged may sue. Now the lawmakers say no - let the shield stand.

I have stood before rooms of men who made laws about my body without asking my body. I know this weather. The lawgiver writes the rule, then wonders why the ruled complain.

Think on what a shield covers. A man in uniform fabricates a lie. He is dishonest. He is careless with a life. And the men in fine halls say he must not be answerable. Answerable to whom, then? To himself? A man who judges his own case is judge, jury, and the wrong all at once.

I carried children and saw them carried off. If a constable stood by and did nothing - or worse, helped - and I went to the law for a word of redress, what would they tell me? That the officer is protected. That my grief has no standing. That the door is locked from the inside.

They say suits against police would open a flood. I say the flood already came through - it came through the front door of every house where the shielded man did his work. The lawsuit is not the flood. The lawsuit is the mop.

And here is the question that needs no answer: if the officer did nothing wrong, what does he fear from a courtroom? Only the guilty need a shield that big. An honest man stands in the light and lets the facts look at him.

So I say to those MPs: come down from your benches. Stand in the street where the shielded man does his work. Stand where the mother stands. Then vote. If your vote is the same after standing there, at least you voted with your eyes open.

The law that cannot be questioned is not law. It is a wall. And walls were built to be stood against.