Publisher's Synopsis
When the British say they are "fair and just," the query immediately to mind is whether we are merely hearing repetitive defend rhetoric or are being enlightened by some self-assurance that the British not only believe what they say but can also evidence this self-assurance that they claim. Intellectually, the self-assurance boasts two separate qualities; fair and just notwithstanding the universal consensual assumption that the two represent the same value (yet are expressed in tautology). Fairness - from which fair emerged as both an adjective and a verb - is an inherent quality of the human being. The quality is innate in the human being. Justice - from which just emerged as both an adjective and a verb - on the other hand is mechanism designed by the human mind, to all intents and purposes, to deliver fairness. This essay responds to the question of British fairness and justice by exploring the laws and practices of the British territorial-State. This is a necessary tack because in order to understand how fair and just a population is, the appropriate unit of analysis is the impersonal level of the State on a plain that enables us to review the country's laws and Governmental practices. In undertaking this exercise in this manner, the essay works with the British socio-political process as the over-arching benchmark. The essay, therefore, examines British fairness within the following activities of the State; (i) criminal law, (ii) employment law, (iii) social policy as an aspect of the law, (iv) property law, (v) discretionary power to 'State Apparatuses', and (vi) the five traditions of governance made up of seven practices comprising (i) three types of democracy, (ii) a constitutional monarchy, (iii) a parliamentary oligarchy, (iv) an hereditary nobility and (v) a lifetime nobility. This essay concludes that the British claim of custodianship to fairness is not intellectually sound and is founded on false applause. It is at best a boast premised on "unconscious falsehood." As a utility, it is an ideological rhetoric and as ideologies go, they are either credible or incredulous.
