Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

For too long the law has been used not just to protect and organise a just and civilised society, but as a tool of enrichment and the protection of privilege. In a modern age of celebrity there are those who, sometimes with quite modest talent or skill, but with either a fashionable persona or a lust for power, use the law as a means of coercion and concealment. It falls to independent judges to interpret and pass judgement, but they have to do this within the terms of the law. Any unreasonable interpretation will be challenged by appeal.

All this works beautifully provided the law has public acceptance. Once the law fall into disrepute or loses public support it becomes unenforceable. It then becomes, in the old phrase, an ass, making the judges look impotent, while expensive lawyers are humiliated. Such has happened to the peculiar devolution of the Human Rights Act, to enable celebrities to keep activities which would upset their followers and spoil the value of their brand, out of the media.

This is because the media, as an organised business run and owned and managed in conventional ways is ever more overtaken by a new media run by the people themselves. These are the very people who bestow celebrity; in return they demand knowledge 24/7, of every little detail of the private as well as public lives of those whom they have anointed and to whom, through brand support, they pay untold riches. They will not have it when those riches are used to shut them out. There is no law that can contain the power of the people, whether the Arabs in their Spring or Twitterers and their footballers. The world is now waking up to this new reality.

Establishments everywhere are under attack. Their borders, secure for so long behind despotic, unfair or unrealistic, laws customs or regulations, whether propping up murderous regimes, or allowing an after shave brand to fornicate in private, look increasingly unstable. This is all because in the old media the people were told what their masters or exploiters thought they should know. In the new media people everywhere can talk directly to each other and tell each other everything.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2011 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.