Secret justice: How Cameron and Clegg vowed to hand back our liberties but are instead planning illiberal changes to justice system

David Rose reports for the Daily Mail:

What a difference 19 months makes. Speaking in the sun-lit Downing Street gardens as he launched the Coalition back in May 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron promised it would be ‘committed to civil liberties and curbing the power of the state’.

Nick Clegg added that after years of Labour authoritarianism, theirs would be a government ‘that hands you back your liberties’.

Now, however, almost unnoticed, this same Government is planning to enact highly illiberal changes to the justice system.

If, as Mr Cameron intends, they become law later this year, the consequences will be an unprecedented growth of secret hearings in both civil court cases and inquests; to deny ordinary citizens the ancient Common Law right to challenge evidence against them; and to make it far more difficult to call wrongdoing by government agencies to account.

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