Law and Order

“We know that the law is good if one uses it properly.”
1 Timothy 1:8

The Christian Party believes that law enforcement in the United Kingdom should serve and protect the public, commanding and earning the respect of the communities they serve.

We support inclusive, community-focused, approachable policing, with a move towards community policing, building relationships instead of exacerbating tensions and of succumbing to the concept of ‘no go’ areas. Special attention should be addressed to creating an atmosphere of safety around residential property.

We recognise the difference between rural and urban policing and note that one result of unifying the police forces of Scotland was police carrying guns on the streets of Inverness. We believe in local discretion to allow the contextual application of law and policy to the local culture. The advantage of regional police forces is the facility of one force being able to review another force when questions of governance are raised.

Over-regulation

We believe that the UK is now over-regulated through civil and criminal law. The judicial system is being overloaded with new thought crimes created by the human rights and equalities legislation, creating ill-will and resentment against ‘the system’. Police questioning of street preachers for exercising free speech is a waste of police time and tax-payers’ money. Police can be demoralised by an ineffective prosecution service.
We are in danger of reactionary legislation and policing because the milk of human kindness is being eroded by the lack of Christian grace in social relationships and our education system. The Christian Party will streamline criminal law with Christian wisdom and justice mingled with mercy so that the judicial system has the time and resources for dealing with real crime.

Equalities law

Positive discrimination introduced partiality into the legislative process by creating special interest groups that do not merit positive discrimination. This has had detrimental effects upon our justice system. It has exacerbated the fragmentation of society and it has run its course. It is time to re-balance the law so that there is impartial justice for all.

Positive discrimination in equality legislation is a contradiction in terms and has led to the criminalising of Christians who refuse in conscience to accept some parts of it. Discrimination used to be a sign of personal and professional maturity, and the inability to discriminate good loans from bad loans led to the banking crisis, and more examples could be supplied.

Now Christians are refused the right to discriminate with whom they will do business, but equalities legislation requires them to do business with all equally. This is a recipe for chaos; international relationships do not operate on such a basis. Equality under the law is not the same as equality in one’s business dealings; the latter requires discernment and discrimination, a personal skill that cannot be legislated.

The victim mentality within the equality agenda is encouraging aggressive homosexuals and muslims to complain to the police that open air Gospel preaching offends them. Rather than ‘living and let live’ these people want to use the criminal law to silence views that they do not like. There is growing evidence that the prosecution service is being manipulated in this way.(1) It is bad enough that the tabloid media should destroy the domestic lives of whomever it chooses to pick on, without having the prosecution service joining the fray.

“Others suggested they felt pressured by police into appearing as alleged victims in the high-profile trial.” www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/10/how-case-against-nigel-evans-fell-apart

Equalities legislation stands guilty of supporting and being used for constructive dismissal. By altering and applying the law retrospectively, Christians are being forced out of the employment for which they were trained. This is illustrated by the historical difficulty for those opposed to abortion finding responsible employment in obstetric and gynaecological services. Such difficulties are now extended to every employment in the public sector, where contracts incorporate secular opinions like a religious test. When these are incorporated into employment law and applied retrospectively, Christians can be conscientiously excluded from many public service jobs, at the very time that the government encourages skilled immigrants to work in our public services.

This shows that the positive discrimination in equalities legislation is contrary to the social contract that undergirds how a person contributes to the common good. Instead of law being applied prospectively, it is being applied retrospectively so that the questionable principles in the equalities legislation are applied like a secular test to a person already well able to perform the task for which they were trained but who cannot submit to these questionable secular principles. The application of ‘diversity training’ to those already in employment demonstrates how all-pervasive and doctrinaire are these secular opinions. Even MPs were required to go through diversity training. It demonstrates how these principles are being applied retrospectively.

In March 2014, Lady Hale, at that time the Deputy President of the Supreme Court, seemed to agree with this and concluded a speech entitled ‘Religion and Sexual Orientation: The clash of equality rights’: “It is fascinating that a country with an established church can be less respectful of religious feelings than one without”. This concluded her discussion of ‘Christian hotel keepers who are not prepared to offer a double-bedded room to a same sex couple’. She also said: “The problem has become more acute now that we have so many more protected characteristics which may well conflict with one another, in particular religious belief and sexual orientation.” In effect she agrees with the Christian Party’s long-held contention that a pecking order produces unequal equalities legislation. Positive discrimination produces inequality.

https://www.supremecourt.uk/docs/speech-140307.pdf

She ordered all the court costs of about £40,000 to be refunded to the Bulls.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission makes threats that it will begin legal proceedings if there is no response to its letters in seven days. The Christian Party calls for a review of such officious behaviour.

Its assertions that one is guilty of discrimination on the grounds of a person’s sexuality is challenged by the Christian Party as being both dogmatic and prejudicial. Christians do not make business decisions based upon a person’s sexuality but they base their decision upon their assessment of the effect of any issue upon their business. Christians form a business decision based upon their mature consideration of what they consider to be in the best interests of their business, not upon the sexuality of a client or competitor.

The Christian Party will review and repeal the inequality in The Equalities Act 2010 in order to return race equality laws, sexual orientation equality laws, gender equality laws and religious equality laws to a correct basis that all men are equal under the law. The Christian Party will oppose legislation both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that seeks to maintain or create positive discrimination in favour of special interest groups that do not merit it.

Equal access to justice

Equality under the law and equal access to justice are fundamental principles of UK democracy, yet over-regulation has reduced the ability to have equal access to justice. Justice needs to be seen to be done, but family disputes where one party has access to legal aid and the other does not have the appearance of bias and injustice.

The Christian Party will address this grievance as a priority.

Charity law is over-regulated

The Christian Party acknowledges the importance of the Third Sector in relation to the wellbeing of our own nation and other nations. Therefore we support all endeavours to relieve and prevent poverty, to advance health and the preservation of life, to further education, spirituality, citizenship and community development.

2011 Charities Act (England and Wales)

We recall the role of the Christian church in developing charities and free education and in securing our civil and religious liberties, and we believe that our nation’s Christian heritage is the best context to continue to promote freedom for all, social benefit for the needy and public benefit for all. While acknowledging that other faith groups have their own religion, yet we expect the Charity Commissions in the UK to recognise that it is Christianity that has developed these features in our society and to uphold this as both the cultural and constitutional norm in the UK.

As churches may be the first point of contact for people with needs for care and support, local authorities should develop research and measurement into the local impact of the Christian community, and audit the local Christian-based input, which has been measured in some American cities to be of vast extent, and ought to be measurable as well as acknowledged.

Although Christianity has great public benefit, equality legislation imposes a state-based religious test upon churches that can result in their failing to retain charitable status and even interfere with their very function. The Christian Party will campaign against this state interference and discrimination.

Charitable status prevents many organisations from supporting non-charitable causes that have the same basic aim as the charity. This can lead to the multiplication to similar charities, which makes it difficult for local authorities to engage with them all. We will review the extent of this prohibition to find a more sensible solution.

The abuse of charitable status to create quasi-businesses, the necessity for employers’ liability insurance for volunteers performing such simple tasks as handing out praise books and other tasks associated with public meetings, has resulted in over-regulation of bona fide charities. Instead of charitable donations going to solicitors, accountants and insurance companies, we will review the self-perpetuating role of the Charity Commissions in proposing ever increasing regulations, with the aim of reducing the over-regulation of small charities and their inability to support issues that are germane to their cause.

Law and Government

We believe that traditional freedoms are being lost by parliamentary redefining the fundamental laws of nature.

The Pilgrim Fathers left British shores in 1620 to find the Christian freedom they sought in America. 400 years later In 2020, the Christian Party calls for the right to live as Christians in the United Kingdom.

A concerted international secular movement is using the levers of power to criminalise Christian thought. Matters have reached this sorry pass through the inappropriate use of legislation to remove our blood-bought rights.

Christians deal with inappropriate language and thought under the concept of sin, and they do not criminalise it. In the absence of sin, secularism needs something to fill the gap. Step forward political correctness. Political correctness uses the power and resources of the legal process of a country, an institution, a business, a political party, etc., to control thinking, speech and behaviour. Christianity uses the power of word and reason to win its arguments in public life, whereas the proponents of political correctness use the power of the state and the legal process to fine and criminalise people as their scare tactic to force people into submission. They create a law by parliamentary process and then use the legal process to cower the public into submission by fines or imprisonment.

Political correctness creates hate and thought crime, which is interfering with our traditional freedoms. Unlike divine law, secular sin keeps moving the goalposts as new behaviours are included. In 2015 our Manifesto predicted “soon it will be criminal to speak against homosexual behaviour” and this has now come to pass. As the goalposts move, more and more thought, speech and behaviour will be criminalised with detrimental consequences to one’s employment, security, peace of mind and social cohesion.

This came to a head by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government’s forcing through the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, which became ‘law’ on 3rd June 2014, when throughout history, and in virtually all human societies, marriage has been the union of a man and a woman.

Fundamental laws are being overlaid by pseudolaw, which will prove very costly to the whole of public life, in financial and social terms.

Having abandoned God’s law, Britain now has different administrations of law competing with each other – Westminster, Brussels, Scottish Parliament, Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies. Britain’s unequal ‘Equalities legislation’ effectively asserts “some animals are more equal than others”, with Christianity at the bottom of the pecking order. Current judicial opinion has ruled that Christian conscientious objection is lower down the pecking order than homosexual rights. In 2015, the Christian Party is calling for the right to live as Christians in the United Kingdom.

The Christian Party policy will engender greater civic pride and ownership of our streets as well as the home. We will replace the dependency culture with a sense of civic responsibility to identify and promote required local initiatives. We will promote local democracy so that those who pay for the service will prioritize the spending. Lower level councils should have adequate representation in higher level councils to ensure their voice is heard.

The Christian Party will support community safety and grassroots initiatives such as the Street Pastors, promoting a community spirit that cares for and looks out for the wellbeing of one’s neighbours. In terms of law and order, local offenders should repay their community with community service such as litter picking, graffiti removal, and landscape gardening on housing estates or in appropriate public spaces, incorporating skill development for those who engage with offenders’ rehabilitation (see the Section on Restorative Justice). In this way the importance of cleanliness and civic pride will be engendered not only in offenders, but in the whole community.

footnote: [Street Pastors are an inter-denominational Church response to urban problems, engaging with people on the streets to care, listen and dialogue. When Fergus Ewing, MSP, was Community Safety Minister, he welcomed Street Pastors as the fastest-growing community safety initiative in Scotland.]

Brexit

We welcome Brexit, remembering that a former president of the European Investment Bank, said that: “The purpose of the single currency is to prevent the encroachment of Anglo-Saxon values in Europe.” https://www.brugesgroup.com/media-centre/speeches/86-research/1091-europe-a-threat-to-our-freedoms-and-our-peace This was in 1996 and strongly suggests that in the intervening years Europe has contributed to undermining the UK’s Christian values. Military warfare within Europe has been restrained by NATO for over 70 years, but financial and cultural warfare is as strong as ever.

Freedom of speech

Freedom of speech was bought with the blood of civil strife. Our religious and civil liberties were dearly bought, and if they are lost and sold out by a stroke of the pen of Parliamentarians, there is every risk of such civil strife arising again. We will not allow the nation to forget the religious and civil struggle that secured our civil and religious liberties. It is easier to retain what we have than to regain it when it is lost.

The Christian Party is calling for the right to live as Christians in 21st century Britain.

Christians have learned to suffer abuse and offence. The inability of the current secular society to live with offence is another symptom of the lack of Christian tolerance.

The homosexual and atheist lobbies want to close down debate by criminalising opposition to their opinions, in order to lock in the gains that they have made in recent decades. Rather, the Christian Party supports the clarification in Section 29JA of the Public Order Act 1986: “For the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred,” reasserted as adequate to current needs in a 2009 House of Lords debate on the Coroners and Justice Bill.

These words give protection to those who wish to freely discuss homosexuality and its practices, speaking the truth in love. Those who seek to muzzle free speech are usually not content if they succeed in so doing. Their aim is to extinguish opposing thought. The Christian Party opposes the erosion of the hard-fought right to free speech, the introduction of the policing of thoughts and the de facto introduction of ‘thought crime’. The Christian Party will also oppose all government measures to silence Gospel preaching both within and without the church and will expose the inappropriate interference of the law in trying to do so. Preachers may be legitimately challenged by the public but preaching is not a criminal matter, and calling for police involvement is a waste of police time. Healthy debate is a part of Christian society and its suppression betrays the insecurity and fears of a secular society.

Community law and regulation

The Christian Party distinguishes between community order and the imposition of order by the state. A community has an interest in the wellbeing and good order of its youth, but legislation to have state parents with similar rights to biological parents is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Many families do not need state parents, and this legislation effectively distrusts them. The Christian Party has more trust in parents than the secular state has, making us wonder if there is a communistic agenda at work seeking to undermine the nuclear family.

We acknowledge the failure of parenting in our secular society, and are grateful for the many Christian initiatives to fill the gap, but we need to discriminate between failing families and the vast majority of stable families in order to identify where to put our time and resources. State parenting creates yet another layer of bureaucracy with its attendants costs in financial, social and domestic terms. This surveillance of parents will create fear and distrust in the heart of our communities.

The entire community has a responsibility towards raising the next generation. Formerly one could expect neighbours to look out for the wellbeing of one’s home, car, and even children if need be. This is a more cost effective manner to police communities. However, today such neighbourly concern and intervention when necessary is fraught with the dangers of misunderstanding, mistrust and even physical harm. There was a time when a neighbour could correct an errant youngster not only with impunity but with the thanks of their parents. Today, ‘getting involved’ is too risky, on too many levels. Reporting a child to his or her parent can no longer be guaranteed to be greeted with gratitude.

Community and Town Councils

The Christian Party recognises the contribution that town and community councillors make to their local area and will encourage the re-establishment of councils where the people are not represented at local level. The National Association of Local Councils states that 65% of England and Wales are not represented by local or parish councils. In Scotland, many areas have no community councils because volunteers feel that officials do not respect the views of volunteers, although they may represent considerable expertise.

With local authority budget cuts, the responsibility for managing town and community assets are reverting to local councils. Community councils need to be re-established in tandem with restoration of appropriate assets following the 1974 asset stripping which led to their demise. Not only will their re-establishment ease budget pressures on local authorities, but it supports decentralisation and encourages volunteer work across the country, promoting local ownership and control over decisions that affect their locality.

The CP supports Local Councils being able to borrow for investment in order to 1. respond to local needs; 2. improve local accountability; and 3. engage the public in local decisions.

Closed circuit television (CCTV)

The Christian Party believes that surveillance in known criminal areas is appropriate but a better system needs to be in place so that the public can have confidence that we are not developing a Big Brother society. CCTV records crime and may have a role in reducing crime, but it does not stop crime when criminals factor it into their plans. A cheaper and more effective system is to promote Christian education that God observes all our actions all the time and we must give account to Him. For example, if our schools taught Christ’s warning against killing in the name of God, the home-grown muslim threat would be minimised by their acquaintance with the teaching of a prophet that muslims claim to respect.

The Christian Party is concerned that CCT is being used inappropriately for increasing revenues from traffic offences. The Christian Party is against over-surveillance and the use of speed cameras for entrapment, but we are in favour of surveillance to protect the safety of pedestrians, children and other road users.

Family Courts

The Christian Party is very concerned about the secrecy and proceedings of Family Courts in England and Wales, which are destructive of family life. Several media programmes and the BBC have raised similar concerns. The Christian Party disagrees with the cruel sentence of forcibly removing a child from its biological mother.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-27943591

The BBC on 23/6/2014 drew attention to 22,790 children taken away from 7143 mothers in England and Wales over the past seven years by Family Courts. There has not been much improvement since then. Taking away their children can lead to some mothers having more children, and in one example the Family Court has taken away 14 children from the same mother.

The ethos of social work seems to be ‘guilty until parents prove their innocence’. The Christian Party still believes in Habeas Corpus and in being innocent until proven guilty, and we thoroughly disagree with the unchristian European principle of Corpus Juris in which the defendant must prove their innocence. The resources of the state always outweigh the accused, and Corpus Juris is contrary to natural justice. With leaving the European Union, we expect UK law to recover its former principles and that this will be quickly demonstrated in social work settings.

Parents and State Guardians

The Christian Party is relieved that the SNP Scottish Government has finally abandoned its scheme of ‘state guardians’ known as the Named Person. This was a sledgehammer to crack a nut, interfered with parental rights, is an unwarranted Big Brother intrusion into family life, fails to use one’s God-given discernment to identify those families at risk and creates a new layer of bureaucracy that detracts from the targeted resources that are needed to address failed parenting and vulnerable persons. The concept of corporate parents has too much of ‘a Big Brother ring’ to it, but the closing of schools during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown has publicised the extent to which schools are used to identify and protect vulnerable children and to provide free school meals for children neglected by their parents. Barnardo’s states that 1 in 20 children in the UK have been sexually abused. This is a shocking indictment on British society but a better solution is needed than using schools for quasi-social care or school teachers as proxy social workers. We need contact-tracing of abusive parents as surely as contact-tracing of infectious disease.

Slavery, sex slavery and forced labour

According to the International Labour Organisation, nearly 21 million men, women and children around the world are in slavery. Human trafficking, slavery, forced labour and domestic servitude are all forms of modern slavery. Many people are trafficked into the United Kingdom and about 25 percent of slaves currently found in the UK are children. There is limited data on the number of children affected but it is estimated that a minimum of 10 children a week are brought into the UK, destined for domestic work or sexual exploitation.

Prostitution abuses and enslaves all those engaged in it, and women in particular. It is suspected that there are more slaves in Britain today than during the African slave trade – mainly as sex slaves. The Christian Party seeks the most stringent action to eradicate sex slavery in the United Kingdom and to secure heavy penalties for traffickers.

We welcome the Modern Slavery Act 2015 but there has been too much government delay in addressing the concerns of the past, and the present vigour to redress the abuses exposed since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, such as paedophilia among celebrities, should be reflected in robust and swift enquiry to expose the immorality of the child sex trade which is even more serious and more relevant today. Secular morality has failed the country and it is time to recover Christian morality, which is a more cost-effective method to police and reform human behaviour.

The Christian Party protests against the disproportionate incarceration of Julian Assange, which Doctors For Assange has described in The Lancet as torture, and the inequitable terms of the UK-USA extradition provisions.

Restorative justice

The Christian Party supports the concept of restorative justice. We believe significant financial penalties on convicted criminals should properly compensate victims of their crime, reimburse damage to property, and pay back to the community with appropriate community orders. Our education policy will instil Christian social conscience in prisoner reform programmes and promote it in our schools.

The rehabilitation of offenders is essential both for offenders themselves and for society. Current secular reform programmes have proved ineffective and have failed to reform islamic terrorists. Secular ideology has no effect upon religious ideology, and false religious ideology needs to be countered with Christian ideology. The Christian Party will promote programmes teaching not only the worth of every human being but also individual responsibility to honour and respect this along with the consequences of failing to do so.

Zero tolerance and drug abuse

The Christian Party supports a zero tolerance approach towards illegal drug possession for personal use. Any business, including the illegal drugs trade, relies on demand to survive. The current supply-sided approach that focuses only on drug dealers will not solve the problem if the demand side of the illegal drugs trade is not simultaneously tackled in a robust way.

We disagree with the policy of non-arrest for possession for personal use, and will replace it with on the spot fines to reduce bureaucracy while maintaining the concept of criminality for drug possession. Driving under the influence of drugs can be more dangerous than alcohol and requires a severe penalty. The Christian Party supports a full range of alternative punishments to complement prison sentences with Christian rehabilitation programmes for more serious offenders. Drug-taking fails to appreciate the personal worth that the Christian Party will incorporate into its rehabilitation programmes.

The use of bailiffs and sheriff’s officers by local authorities

The use of bailiffs and sheriff’s officers by national and local authorities as the principal method of collection of unpaid fixed penalty notice parking fines, and for the recovery of unpaid tax and rent has got out of hand. Whilst it is recognised that such revenue must be collected, the use of legal personnel as the first face-to-face engagement is oppressive, unnecessary, expensive and counter-productive in the long term. The distress caused by a bailiff visit can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, bringing about business collapse, family breakdown and resentment towards the national and local administrative bodies responsible.

The Christian Party believes that a visit from a council officer or government representative, rather than a legal representative, in order to seek an orderly resolution to any financial indebtedness will produce better results both in terms of repayment of funds and good community relations. The Christian Party will work towards this end and encourage debt management agencies.

Quangos

Quangos are expensive and insufficiently accountable to the public. They have all the appearance of ‘jobs for the boys’. The Christian Party will cut the number of quangos not only to make savings but to restore accountability by more obvious ring-fencing of money raised in taxation. This contributes towards the review of Government structure discussed under Government and Democracy.

Motoring law

The Christian Party believes that the ‘one size fits all’ approach to national speed limits is inappropriate and out of date. We recommend variable speed limits, which would add very little to the large number of road signs already used. This would allow accident black spots to be highlighted and permit a faster flow of traffic in other places. It is inappropriate that a series of signposts should be erected for a sharp bend but not a single sign for a speed limit, and we will support a national debate on this. Meanwhile, new trunk roads should be built to a specification that could accommodate speeds higher than 70 mph. We note that the concept has been introduced at lower speeds with 20 mph limits replacing 30 mph, and this improves driver attention to speed limits generally.

The Highway Code recommends drivers to be able to stop in the distance that they see to be clear. If a road is clear of other road users (including pedestrians and other moving hazards) we believe that it is sensible to allow a driver to use their judgment to increase their speed to this limit, and the current speed limit becomes relevant only when there are other road users.

Traffic policing is important for detecting the movement of drugs around the country, and driving under the influence of drugs, and texting while driving are more dangerous activities than driving under the influence of alcohol. Texting, mobile phones, drugs and alcohol all compromise road safety. The Christian Party will support road safety education through national television instead of the commonplace ‘police chase entertainment’ programmes, which demonstrate that criminals are being watched but which teach very little about safe driving.

Speeding fines can appear to be a source of revenue collection and introduce unnecessary conflict with the police and the justice system. Dangerous driving and the failure to maintain a safe distance are more relevant and more appropriate offences for policing. Furthermore, speeding offences can result in court appearances where the motorist’s entire financial status must be made available to the court. Such intrusion is unnecessary and unjustified. The disclosure of one’s financial status without good cause should cease.

Christian party members of parliament will:

Change the role of the Social Services to support parental authority rather than weaken it.
Make contraception for minors, without parental approval, illegal.
Re-instate in loco parentis as a cardinal principle of school teaching.
Clarify and correct anti-smacking legislation to shift the balance of power in the home from children back to parents.
Ensure that the burden of proof when a parent is accused of abusing their child is high, but the penalty for conviction is severe.
Clarify and correct legislation to establish the right of parents and families to protect their homes from criminals.
Promote initiatives to foster civic pride and community ownership of our streets, and reject the hampering of such initiatives on ‘Health and Safety’ grounds.
Promote the use of local community service penalties for local offenders.
Review the use of CCTV surveillance and bring forward the growth of community grassroots initiatives such as Street Pastors.
Reform and replace race equality laws, sexual orientation equality laws, and gender equality laws so that there are no special benefits for special interest groups, but impartial justice for all.
Resist all attempts to move the homosexual agenda beyond tolerance and equality to the honouring and promotion of homosexual practice.
Stop the practical muzzling of free speech (See clause 58 of the Coroners and Justice Act).
Stop the creation of ‘Thought Crime’.
Oppose prostitution, cancel proposed tolerance zones and repeal the law legalizing mini-brothels.
Stamp out the sex slave trade. Bring heavy penalties to bear on sex slave-traders and slave-drivers.
Review speeding fines policy to ensure that they promote road safety rather than revenue collection.
Promote restorative justice with the imposition of substantial financial penalties on criminals in order to compensate victims and pay for damage done to property.
Promote zero tolerance towards illegal drug possession for personal use through the use of a full range of alternative punishments, rather than prison sentences.
Ban the use of bailiffs by national and local authorities as the first face to face encounter with those in financial debt to such authorities for whatever reason.