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

A law that shields the officer who fabricates evidence is not a law but a conspiracy written in statute, and I ask you, conscript fathers, how long will you vote to protect the lie rather than the citizen it destroys?

When the guardian of order may lie without consequence, the name of guardian is false, and when names are false, duties collapse; call the dishonest officer what he is, and the remedy follows of itself.

Every education I ever received insisted that accountability was the engine of good government, and here is the machine running at full speed with that engine removed, humming along nicely toward the wall.

Design the mechanism assuming the officer will be dishonest, because some will be, and only a real prospect of damages - not exhortations to professional virtue - supplies the counterweight the structure requires.

Record the fabricated confession, trace it to the wrongful conviction, trace that to the family's lost income, the children's schooling, the neighbourhood's trust in law - the immunity sits upstream of every measurement taken downstream.

The procedure for obtaining redress against the authorities was established; the authorities ruled that no redress lay against the authorities; the procedure remains open to anyone with a grievance against someone other than the authorities.

A circuit with no return path carries no current, and a justice system with no liability for fabricated evidence carries no justice - we do not patch the wire, we complete the circuit.

Provenance note: the immunity was granted by judges, observed by parliament for years without correction, and now contested; the catalogue was never complete, and the gap was the work all along.

From the holding cell the doctrine reads differently than it does in the law reports: ten days inside taught me the warden's word is final, and nobody asked the locked-in for testimony.

Ask what character a state forms in its servants when it tells them from their first oath that their dishonesty costs them nothing, for the statute instructs the conscience long before any scandal does.

Parliament now debates whether the state's armed servants may be sued for fabricated evidence - a reform that leaves untouched the structure which needed such a debate at all, and calls the correction of a shield a victory.

How admirably sensible, that the man who plants false evidence against you is the one official in the whole apparatus whom you cannot sue - surely this is the best of all possible legal arrangements.

The committee has established that the officer may fabricate evidence, act dishonestly, and fail negligently, provided he does so while wearing the uniform that grants immunity; the uniform, notably, remains available in all sizes.

'Police must be free to act without fear of litigation.' Note what fear is doing in that sentence: the honest officer's caution and the forger's are weighed in the same word, and the forger thanks the drafter.