So why should a judge not be political, what is wrong with a judge deciding to be progressive? Well in the UK no one elects the judiciary; the independence of the judiciary was guaranteed by judges agreeing to honour the requirement to be strictly neutral and objective, as my late father, who was a Scottish Sheriff, did. He always said that the moment judges start to dabble in politics they lose all authority. They are the Crown and are bound by the same laws that bind the Crown.
Yet that is no longer the case, is it? We now have judges, prosecutors and Chief Constables who see it as their duty to ‘be progressive’. This is all done under the guise of ‘supporting human rights’ but in practice it creates a scenario where they start making up laws as they go along. The police do similar.
In the UK Parliament is sovereign. That is the fundamental guiding principle of our constitution. But Blair vandalised this by removing so much actual power from Parliament and allocating it to unelected, unaccountable quangos. He did this to drive the progressive agenda, even when Labour is out of power. And it has worked.
A process that has been echoed here in Canada, and no doubt Australia and New Zealand as well, where the Crown’s judges presume to interpret the law in light of the latest woke trend rather than reserving judgment for the most egregious attempts by legislatures to make unconstitutional decisions.
Is my impression incorrect that Liz Truss was actually a very good PM not in terms of her results but in terms of her motivations, goals, what she had in mind, and where her heart was?
(At least compared to the rest of the Tories who become PM over the last 20 years)
Indeed and the traditional right continues to object to this instead of opting to adopt such successful strategies
The new right has no such qualms about learning lessons
Some consider that the UK Establishment is probably fascist (oppressive dictatorial control), but without the Leader and posh uniforms.
The Conservatives were supine in front of such fascism and Labour thought they were among friends but are rapidly realising that the ‘enemy of my enemy’ may still be an enemy to their plans.
Shlomo
Truss was half good, half bad.
The (mostly) good was a broadly correct analysis of Britain’s economic ills and the correct solutions to them (the ‘mostly’ is because she failed to address the issue of State expenditure, which was the casus belli that enabled the Establishment coup against her).
The bad was that she tried to do it all in one hit. Only possible with a good handle on the key levers of power. With the Lords, the Judiciary and a large part of her own Party in the Establishment camp, she only stood a faint chance if she had a backbone of steel and a cadre of talented and equally determined supporters. She had neither.
Look at the current battles that Trump is engaged in with a (broadly) similar agenda, and see that he has a fair chance. She did not.
The Blob isn’t coming for Starmer.
Starmer is quintessential Blob.
What he has learnt is that the constitutional havoc wrought under the Blair/Brown terror has rendered politicians unable to make meaningful change away from the ‘progressive’ agenda.
Even though the demands of the electorate may have come to oppose elements of that agenda, and he needs, however reluctantly, to shift in that direction too in order to curry votes, he is unable to do so.
Hoist by his own petard.
I have never been a fan of the Blackstone (Sir William Blackstone) doctrine that Parliament could do anything it liked – for example making having brown eyes a “crime” punishable by death, or whatever.
But this doctrine has been replaced by an even worse doctrine – the doctrine that officials and unelected Judges can do anything they like, with references to vague documents such as the European Convention on Human Rights (“written by British lawyers Paul” – SO WHAT? It is still a hopelessly vague document regardless of the nationality of the lawyers who wrote it).
At least the House of Commons can be voted out – but it has handed a lot of its power over to “Woke” (Critical Theory) judges – and “independent regulators” (Quangos) controlled by leftists – and more and more of these “independent regulators” are being created all the time.
This is the irony – a Parliament with unlimited power ends up with no real power at all, because unlimited power includes the power to give away its powers.
And YES Toby James – “the blob” is NOT coming for Sir Keir Starmer – who is very much of “the blob”.
Sir Keir Starmer is of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers – he personally wrote articles that show his opposition to the basic principles of the Common Law.
The House of Commons is dominated by people like Sir Keir Starmer – so even if it took back powers from the judges and other officials (and do not hold your breath for that), nothing would change.
This is the worst House of Commons in British history, it is filled with (dominated by) leftists – yet many people still have not grasped this basic fact.
The House of Commons elected in 1945 was dominated by people with bad economic ideas – but they did not hate the country, they did not want to get rid of the British people, destroy the family and society generally (a process that has been going on since the 1960s – but has now reached breaking point).
Unlike now.
So getting rid of the unelected judges and the officials in the “independent regulators” would not make much of a difference – not with a Parliament like this.
And the next General Election is not going to come before 2029.
Will there be much of a Britain left by then?
She got coup’d by the City of London/government blob through the ‘independent’ Bank of England.
I was never a fan of her as a minister, and think, at least in 2022, she was too liberal to reverse course too much (and her personality seems ill-suited to being a populist leader), but they never even let her try.
Now we know fully what was going on regarding immigration under BoJo, I think the damage was already done before Truss became PM. She has become less economically liberal on immigration since leaving office. Whether this would have been the case had she stayed PM longer we can never know.
Martin, Toby and Shlomo.
Yes indeed – Liz Truss was good as regards economics – but buckled under the pressure of the establishment, most people do. I am no hero myself.
I do not think that the lady fully grasped the social and cultural issues whilst a minister – being in that political bubble, but since the coup against her the lady has come to understand the British establishment, and its deep hatred (and HATRED is the correct word) of the British people – understand it only too well. The very existence of this country is at stake as is the very existence of other Western nations – but the establishment do not wish the people to understand the real threat to their existence as a people – hence distractions “Russia, Russia, Russia” as President Trump calls it, and “Bulgarian spies in Great Yarmouth” (no I am not making that up – it is the lead story in the British press) – by the way, Great Yarmouth is the Parliamentary Constituency of Rupert Lowe, a person the establishment has targeted for destruction.
With the public distracted by the imaginary threat of Rupert Lowe and other “Islamophobe agents of Putin” (ironic as Mr Putin has increasingly allied with Islamic forces – and has used them extensively against Ukraine), the establishment can get on with their work of destroying Britian.
As for those people who claim that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the United Nations Declaration “protect our liberties”.
How then are people sent to prison for peacefully expressing their opinions? And where were these “protections of fundamental freedoms” during the Covid lockdowns?
The truth is as simple as it is brutal – these high sounding Conventions and Declarations are worded in such a way (deliberately worded in such a way) as to make them useless for defending basic liberties, but very useful indeed for pushing the “Progressive” agenda which is destroying the West – or what was the West.
For example, the United Nations (or “International”) Declaration on Human Rights does not mention any right to keep and bear arms (the defining feature of a free man – over thousands of years), nor does it offer any real protection for Freedom of Speech (not a protection that would stop “Hate Speech” laws), but it is very careful to list “Holidays With Pay” as a fundamental right – no limits on state power, but lots of goods and services from the state or from private employers acting under state edicts.
If these documents were not so tragic, they would be funny.
These are the documents that the officials, including the judges, love so much.