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

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.