Democracy, Dependency, and the Rule of Law We Refuse to Use

by The Panda

Practical steps for legal practitioners

Before turning to theory, two practical interventions are immediately available to those working within the law.

First, practitioners can insist—whether in public procurement advice, regulatory work, or litigation—that existing statutory powers relating to forced labour, safeguarding, and exclusion for grave misconduct are actively considered and lawfully exercised, rather than treated as discretionary afterthoughts.

Second, practitioners can resist the procedural hollowing-out of rights by grounding submissions, advice, and judgments firmly in the substantive protection of Articles 8, 9, and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, treating human agency, dignity, and psychological integrity as constitutional fundamentals rather than political inconveniences.

These are not radical steps. They are orthodox applications of the rule of law.

---

Author’s Note

This article emerged from a formal debate held within the Debating Society of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. The motion — “This House believes that democracy has had its day” — prompted a broader examination of the relationship between democratic legitimacy, moral responsibility, and institutional enforcement. The arguments developed here extend that debate beyond the chamber, applying its core concerns to the UK’s continued failure to activate existing legal powers against forced labour and modern slavery.

---

The United Kingdom is not facing a crisis of democracy in the narrow sense of elections or representation. It is facing a deeper constitutional problem: a widening gap between democratic expression and the rule of law’s capacity to deliver certainty, protection, and moral action. That gap is visible across infrastructure paralysis, declining investor confidence, social polarisation, and a persistent failure to enforce laws designed to prevent grave human rights abuses.

Projects such as HS2 are not merely engineering failures; they are constitutional signals. Years of consultation, litigation, political reversal, and symbolic policymaking have produced uncertainty rather than settlement. Capital does not flee democracy as such; it flees unpredictability. Where lawful decisions cannot be sustained with finality, legality loses its coordinating force.

Comparable democratic states, particularly in Scandinavia, illustrate that this outcome is not inevitable. Democratic participation is preserved, but administration and long-term planning are insulated from perpetual contestation. Decisions are debated, taken lawfully, and then implemented. This is not less democracy; it is stronger constitutionalism.

The same structural weakness is evident in the UK’s response to modern slavery. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 criminalises slavery, servitude, forced or compulsory labour, and human trafficking, yet its principal regulatory mechanism—section 54—imposes only a transparency obligation on large companies.¹² Disclosure is required, but prevention is not. Sanctions are minimal.³ Predictably, compliance has become procedural rather than transformative. Corporate statements repeat; exploitation persists. Transparency has substituted for accountability.⁴

This is not because the UK lacks power. Under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, contracting authorities may exclude suppliers or terminate contracts where there is evidence of grave professional misconduct, including involvement in forced labour or trafficking.⁵ These powers could lawfully remove tainted actors from public supply chains. They are rarely used.⁶ Other jurisdictions demonstrate that enforcement is possible when political will exists. The United States’ Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act presumes goods linked to forced labour are inadmissible unless proven otherwise.⁷ The European Union is moving toward mandatory due diligence and product bans tied to forced labour.⁸

History sharpens the contrast. During the American Civil War, Britain endured the Lancashire Cotton Famine rather than openly aligning with a slave economy. Today, democratic states acknowledge forced labour—including among the Uyghur population—while continuing to benefit from the goods produced. The moral trade-off is no longer confronted openly; it is managed quietly through opacity and procedure.

Engaging seriously with these realities carries a personal cost. Sustained research into forced labour, human trafficking, and organised sexual exploitation can distort one’s sense of what is normal or even believable. There are moments when the scale and consistency of the evidence are so overwhelming that one questions whether what is being observed can truly be happening. Yet the law teaches a basic discipline of inference: if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. We all know it is—iykyk. The refusal to name what is plainly before us is not caution; it is avoidance.

This avoidance has constitutional consequences. Articles 8, 9, and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights—incorporated through the Human Rights Act 1998—protect private life, freedom of conscience and religion, and freedom of expression. These rights are not obstacles to order. They are the legal foundations of dignity, psychological integrity, and peaceful pluralism. When they are treated as negotiable or inconvenient, the result is not stability but fragmentation, anxiety, and polarisation.

Safeguarding human agency must therefore sit at the centre of legal renewal. The Cass Review has highlighted the dangers of institutional drift, ideological capture, and failures of professional judgment in cases involving vulnerable individuals, emphasising the centrality of evidence, consent, and safeguarding.⁹ Likewise, Anthony Julius has argued that the moral authority of law depends on its willingness to confront cultural harm rather than retreat behind procedural neutrality.¹⁰ Without a legal order capable of protecting agency, psychological integrity, and meaningful consent, democracy cannot sustain unity, public mental health, or moral credibility.

This is not a rejection of democracy. It is a call to re-anchor it. A democratic system that can articulate values but will not use its own lawful powers to eradicate exploitation, protect dignity, and provide stability risks continuing in form while failing in substance. Recommitment to enforceable law, institutional restraint, and shared responsibility is essential to democratic renewal.

England’s legal tradition has never understood the rule of law as morally neutral. The figure of St George endures not as a call to violence, but as a symbol of disciplined courage in the defence of the vulnerable against the monstrous. Properly understood, it represents restraint, not conquest; fidelity to law, not force.

In that spirit, the modern custodians of the law—the judiciary, King’s Counsel, and the legal profession more broadly, heirs to traditions once symbolised by the Knights Templar as guardians rather than rulers—must recognise that the most consequential conflicts of our time are not only physical or economic, but spiritual in the deepest sense. They concern the integrity of institutions, the protection of conscience, the preservation of truth, and the capacity of individuals and communities to live with dignity under law.

If the rule of law is to prevail, it must win these wars not through rhetoric or spectacle, but through principled enforcement, moral clarity, and fidelity to its own highest commitments—individually and collectively. Only then can a democratic society recover not merely order, but meaning.

Footnotes (OSCOLA)

1. Modern Slavery Act 2015 ss 1–3.

2. Modern Slavery Act 2015 s 54.

3. Joint Committee on Human Rights, Modern Slavery Act 2015: Thirty-First Report of Session 2017–19 (HL 316, HC 1956) paras 73–76.

4. The Westminster Gazette, ‘Forced Labour and the Powers We Refuse to Use’ (2024) https://www.thewestminstergazette.com/post/forced-labour-and-the-powers-we-refuse-to-use accessed 10 February 2026.

5. Public Contracts Regulations 2015, reg 57(1), (8).

6. Joint Committee on Human Rights (n 3) paras 80–85.

7. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act 2021 (US) s 3.

8. European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation on Prohibiting Products Made with Forced Labour on the Union Market COM (2022) 453 final.

9. Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (DHSC, 2024).

10. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (OUP 2010); see also Anthony Julius, ‘Law, Culture and Moral Responsibility’ (selected essays).