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"Aww poor little flowers."

The poor little flowers are all of us.

What protection would you expect if you were wrongly accused? You'd expect the prosecution to have to prove its case against you. You'd expect that it wouldn't be allowed to take short cuts, to suppress evidence or to present false evidence. In short, you'd expect to be assumed to be innocent unless you were proved guilty in a fair trial.

But you might say "I know I'm innocent, I shouldn't be treated like those bad drug dealers who are guilty."

Well, you may know you're innocent but in advance of a case being heard I don't know whether you are or not nor do I know if those accused of being drug dealers are guilty or not. All I or anyone else including a court can do is make the same assumptions about all of you. It is arrant nonsense to think that there is some means by which you or I, if wrongly accused, are to get some rights and those rightly accused are not.

If from your point of view as an innocent wrongly accused, that assumption of innocence, then that assumption must be extended to all. And in the past that has been reckoned to be a fundamental right of all of us.

Another right, going all the way back to Magna Carta has been our right to due process of law. Due process has come to include the need for TPTB to present an independent judge or magistrate with a prima facie case sufficient to justify a warrant.

This Act sweeps all these rights away and not the least of the issues is that instead of being signed by an independent judge or magistrate warrants are now to be signed by a minister. That raises a whole new spectre of political persecution.

The poor little flowers are all of us.