This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Law, Justice and Democracy, given by John McCluskey, was originally

broadcast in 1986.

In the law, avoidable uncertainty is an evil, an unfettered judicial freedom of choice, a vice.

Consider, for example, how the law applies to industrial relations.

The law must apply in some shape or form

because the law cannot be absent from this or indeed

from any other area of social activity.

Even if Parliament was to pass an act saying in effect,

all laws applying to trade unions are hereby

repealed. That in itself would be creating a complex legal status for trade unions, a status which,

with its privileges and immunities, the courts would have to take account of if anyone raised

in action against a body which claimed to be a trade union.

Indeed, the new law would obviously have to define what a trade union was for the purposes of its application.

Even though the existing law or the ordinary law could be disapplied, the result would be to create, by law, a particular set of rights and immunities for anybody successfully claiming to be a trade union.

So it is axiomatic that some law has to apply in the field of industrial relations, whether it is

intrusive and regulatory or restrained and permissive. Is it not plain that the law that does apply, whatever it may say,

should be precise in its statement and certain in its effects

and therefore predictable in its consequences?

Neither those in industry nor their customers, nor the public at large,

can afford to wait for years or even months

while the legal aspects of industrial disputes are debated through the courts

...