Helena Kennedy: Labour should know better than to erode fundamental values

The latest proposals on criminal justice reform look like further signs of an alarming authoritarian pulse at the heart of the Government. Why is it that people we assumed to be liberal have lost their enthusiasm for civil liberties?

It would be too easy to see this as simply an example of arteries hardening with middle age or the seductive experience of power. Perhaps it is no more than an attempt at crass populism, responding to focus group insistence that criminals get away with it.

An urgent need to address crime is seen as a high priority but while the Government has identified many of the problems on estates and in our inner cities, it seems to be at a loss to find solutions. Their changes to the criminal justice system are not the cure.

Our legal system embodies certain fundamental values. This may seem a trite observation, but it is none the less true, and what is more we would certainly know if it were not the case. We find many of these values now in formal codes of human rights or in domestic legislation which embodies them, such as the Human Rights Act.

But values are also to be found elsewhere: in legal rules and presumptions surrounding procedure and most importantly in certain fundamental concepts which underpin the basic approach to the law. The presumption of innocence, the right to jury trial, the double jeopardy principle, evidential rules.

These values are the accumulated moral wisdom of the law. They are moral understandings which have grown up over time and to dismiss them as "old-fashioned" is a travesty of the painful experience of ordinary people which went into their development. Our loss of historic memory, our amnesia about why civil liberties matter, is extraordinary.

Erosions of civil liberties can come stealthily – not just in jackboots but also in Armani suits. We can tell when somebody seriously wishes to shut down our freedoms through straight bans or persecution. But the stealthy threats are more difficult to identify or may even be missed.

Governments of all complexions will always be tempted to see legal values as obstacles to efficiency. They will put the system under pressure to save money, to assuage concerns and to make victims feel better about crime. The excuses are invariably plausible but the cost to all of us is great.

Playing fast and loose with the rules to get more convictions will ultimately erode trust in the system as a whole. Labour politicians should know better.

Baroness Helena Kennedy became a QC in 1991 and received a life peerage in 1997