As St Augustine tells us in the title of this blog, an unjust law is no law at all. His observation was later more famously endorsed by St Thomas Aquinas, and in his famous 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' Martin Luther King told us that;
"One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'
As with all human concepts, and in the past I have written about freedom and rights, justice is not a self-evident concept and is not at all non-problematic, and like those other concepts, is a human artefact and therefore both dynamic and relative. I would go further than Martin Luther King and say that unjust law is itself immoral. As St Augustine implies, if an unjust law is no law at all, we are under no obligation to either obey it, or even recognise it. In Britain we have a saying that possession is nine tenths of the law. What this means is that ninety percent of British law is with respect to private property. We saw an example of that last week from the Tories. As you will know, the Grenfell Tower block that was consumed by fire is in the borough of Kensington. Within Kensington there are an estimated 1,500 luxury apartments and flats lying empty, some of them for as much as ten to twenty years. They have been purchased by the wealthy global elite who have no intention of living in them, they are simply an investment. Most people with a scintilla of decency and humanity called for such property to be requisitioned for use by the survivors of the Grenfell fire, but the government refused on the grounds that it would have been a breach of the rights of the owners. Thus we have a graphic example that the rights of property in the UK are more important than the rights of human beings. If such legal provisions are not the epitome of unjust, then perhaps someone who reads this can enlighten me.
Despite the best efforts of people like Augustine and Aquinas to convince us otherwise, law does not reflect the divine, rather the reverse is the truth. Humans developed codes of conduct that are replicated in the Ten Commandments long before those commandments were written. As people are social beings, from the very first forms of human intercourse and communal living, people regulated their environment and developed codes of conduct, rules governing right and wrong, what was good for the community and what was damaging to it, for the self-preservation of both the individual and the social group. Such rules and codes used to be known as folklore, and myths developed to give authority to such codes and rules, gods were invented to satisfy the need for authoritative approval of such rules of behaviour. However, far too often such gods were invented to give authoritative approval to the unjust for the benefit of the unscrupulous. This is the character of modern government. British society is a class society, it is also a white patriarchal society, and thus a white male class domination is reflected in our legislation and throughout the entire British normative order, particularly in government. For those of you in other nations who may read this, you will have to conclude for yourselves the character of your own societies but class, gender, and race, will never be far from the surface of your own governmental and legislative arrangements.
In the UK the Grenfell Tower disaster may prove to be a seminal moment as it has brought the whole Tory austerity agenda to the forefront of people's consciousness. The cover-up has begun already and if the Tories are expert at anything it is scapegoating, deflecting the blame onto others and getting themselves off the hook. However, they are spooked at the moment and seeking to portray themselves as being at least marginally human, but justice will not be seen to be served until they are brought to book for their crimes and inhumanity. The history of British 'justice' does not fill me with any confidence that genuine justice will be served. We will watch with interest. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
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