With apologies for intruding on our warm glow of satisfaction at the election result (for many of us,if not all), today I have a reminder that it will take another ten years to unwind the damage that Theresa May caused at the Home Office. Her survival strategy when Home Secretary was to hide, disguise, obfuscate and frustrate, to obstruct scrutiny as far as was possible, and when the blame was getting too close, to throw underlings under the bus.
It was Theresa May, you will recall, who was responsible for importing into Britain 35-year old 'child' refugees complete with beards and middle aged crows feet. I submitted a request under FOI for a copy of the guidance issued by the Home Office to immigration officers in identifying these child migrants. The usual delays and requests for clarification spun out their overdue response to a year before the Information Commissioner took up the case; the Home Office then ignored the Information Commissioner's ruling, and instruction to provide the information. I was just about booking the flight to London to give evidence in the High Court in a case to be brought by the ICO when the Home Office gave way, and provided a glossy DTP'd booklet. The only problem was, it bore a publication date after the date of my FOI request, and after all those adult 'children' had already been admitted. I gave up.
The next one I won't give up. The new select committee chairs will shortly be announced and I will be following closely any calls for evidence by the Home Affairs Select Committee with interest. This time it's the strategy Mrs May developed with regard to the National Crime Agency. The NCA has spent a considerable amount of our tax money in producing glossy, advertorial 'annual reports' describing how brilliant it is, what a huge threat the general public poses to the State, and how they need even more power. The problem is, some of the information given in last year's NCA wankfest was misleading - seemingly deliberately so. I submitted an FOI request to the Home Office, the NCA's parent. No can do, came the response. The NCA enjoys a total exemption from FOI requests on security grounds. Fine, I said, it's not about operational policing matters, it's about inaccuracies and misleading presentation of statistics already in the public domain in the annual report. Who answers for this publication? No-one. Not the Home Office and not the NCA. They could spend a million of tax money issuing glossy brochures telling us that women with unibrows should be subject to surveillance and not one member of the public, not one journalist, not one taxpayer can challenge it. It stinks. And it's got Theresa May's smug inept fingerprints all over it. Hide. Disguise. Obfuscate. Frustrate.
While the EU has not been responsible for Mrs May's dreadful tenure of the Home Office, it has I think been responsible for encouraging our unelected government officials in this impertinence against public scrutiny. They've learned bad ways from Brussels. The abolition of the LCD by the federast Blair and the creation of a Euro-style Ministry of Justice was surely just a first step towards a national police force under the command of the Justice Minister, and the complete disassociation from democratic and local control of our citizen constables.
Charles Moore writes a good piece in the Telegraph today, covering also the intrusion by the courts into matters that are democratic. Sometimes precipitated by well-funded saboteurs of the democratic process such as Gina Miller, sometimes by the dangers of compliance with 'dynamic' frameworks of law under which judges - and not even domestic ones - instead of Parliament continually modify and update the extent and effect of our statutes. Lord Sumption, in this year's Reith lectures, although himself a Remainer, deprecated this growth of 'lawfare' and the intrusion of unelected authority into the democratic process. Moore has a straightforward remedy - to row-back on Blair's pollution of our well-developed state institutions.
The obvious safeguard for reform – this is me speaking, not Professor Ekins – would be to restore in full the rights of the Lord Chancellor, which Tony Blair, in a careless piece of sofa government one weekend, threw away.Update - 50p coins
By a very British paradox, the age when, through the Lord Chancellor, the government theoretically had complete power over appointing judges was also the age in which there was least politicising of those appointments. Judges judged, and politicians did politics. Now we can get back to that.
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On my post of 18th December I hoped that we would see the re-issue of the Brexit 50p coins. The government were ahead of me. The coins were approved by the Queen in Council on the 17th and millions will be released into circulation at the end of next month. Well Done! Carry on.
28 comments:
It was one of the triumphs of the Blair revolution to give us a Supreme Court which was not supreme ( as long as we remained in the EU) and a Ministry of Justice which was not just. Indeed, the Labour advocates of this novelty demanded that it should be a “ continental style” Institution. There was also an inbuilt bias to obstruct the appointments of traditionally minded judges who might reverse or hinder the project. The Conservatives did not even consider reversing the “ reform” - not surprising as Cameron aspired to be “ the heir to Blair”.
In Gilbert & Sullivan’s “ Iolanthe “ the Lord Chancellor could sing
“ The law is the true embodiment
Of everything that’s excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw
And I, my lords, embody the law”
As you say, it seemed to work pretty well!
The Blair system rather reminds me of the present method of appointing bishops to the Church of England which ensures that only ““progressive” modernising, “social gospel” types are ever appointed. The “” Yes Prime Minister” episode on this topic was well worth watching.
I've been saying it for a while, we should be thanking Gina Miller and the courts.
Without her intervention and the decree that there should be a meaningful vote we'd have been stuck with not just May's abysmal withdrawal agreement with its indefinite backstop that would have locked us in to a CU and the single market, we'd have been stuck with May.
I don't think the issuance of new 50p pieces will do much to help the current QE situation.........
Yes, New Labour more to blame on this, however, I disagree on one point: we CAN blame the EU (and predecessors) for Mrs May: the EU enabled weak pathetic nonentities into positions of power. Not very intelligent assistant-librarian level (no offence to assistant librarians!) jobsworths could suddenly strive to be an MP, in power. And they did, production-line PPE Oxford (and similar) we are very much lions led by donkeys. A handful of lefty professors are also partly to blame.
Good luck with your crusade Raedwald.
It will take decades to undo the malign policies of Blair and Cameron/Clegg. And that's IF we have a government which intends doing it.
I'm still not sure we have. The first indication was elevation of Remainer Nicky Morgan to the House of Frauds at the first opportunity Boris had.
Re "I gave up."...that's what they want! Bit like the BBC complaints shite-fest.
DeeDee...something about the NM to Lords is bugging me: she was an average has-been nothing-burger minister etc (OK, she was elected 3 times so maybe good locally) but I am sure BoJo has something up his sleeve.
I'd always felt that the 'Ministry of Justice' was a play straight out of Orwell's '1984'.
Then when you look around at the state of the media and its opinion led 'news' reporting (especially the BBC) plus the collectivising thrust of 'identity politics' (irony) I can only conclude that '1984' was titled 20 years too early.
Social change takes time, especially when it is against the grain of ordinary life.
If you understood how English law works - and it is clear that you do not - then you would recognise that it is very difficult for judges in the higher courts to allow their own views to affect their judgements.
The absolute rule is that they must not err in LAW.
Consistently to avoid so doing is very demanding, and requires a huge body of learning as to case law, coupled with the most stringent intellectual rigour in correlating all that logically with any relevant Statutes.
You appear to want the country to go down the same squalid route as Poland, oh, and the US, where political bias is indeed built into the system.
As if the country needed yet more international disgrace.
@JPM
Do you think that Lady Hale and her colleagues were untouched by her political views? There are sufficient numbers doubting her findings on prorogation to question the issue.
"If you understood how English law works - and it is clear that you do not - then you would recognise that it is very difficult for judges in the higher courts to allow their own views to affect their judgements.
The absolute rule is that they must not err in LAW."
So answer me this - if a Supreme Court decision errs in law because they have allowed politics to cloud their judgement, how can a citizen gain redress? There is no-one above a Supreme Court, effectively the law is what they say it is. Even if everyone else can see it isn't. Its entirely arguable that the Supreme Court decision on the Boris prorogation erred in UK constitutional law, but no-one could do anything about it, their word was final. Similarly in the US where their Supreme Court had to argue black was legally white in order to not throw out Obamacare. It is blatantly obvious that Supreme Courts become a continuation of politics by other means - the example of the US shows us that. At least the US system admits it and provides some controls, we now have a system where all the judges have the same views, which are diametrically opposed to at least 50% of the population. That is not sustainable.
JPM - Perhaps you should read both the post and Moore's piece again, because it seems clear you understand neither.
Judges have become politicised, the argument goes, since Blair, the creation of the Supreme Court and the abolition of the role of the LC in their appointment. There is no precedent for their finding that what has hitherto been a 'matter in Parliament' i.e prorogation is not in fact a matter in Parliament but a judiciable matter. This is an entirely new construction.
I'm afraid one needs more than your very basic grasp of law to understand the difficulties.
You apparently seriously expect a party to win a case, where the prime Respondent would not even provide evidence on Oath?
The Court had no evidence therefore that, Johnson did not mislead the Queen.
But it was simpler still.
The UK Constitution says in writing but one thing "Parliament Alone is The Law".
How could the Court possibly NOT have found in the Applicant's favour, then?
We've just seen that it does not take five weeks to draft a Queen's speech too, haven't we?
You seem to forget that the Remain groups lost more cases than they won as well.
And thirty-four proposed Bills are hardly a "typhoon" of legislation.
It is impossible to tell how much of our law actually comes from the EU. As the late Lord Denning said, it was coming in like a flood tide. It comes in several ways - Directives ( requiring member states to amend their statute book, decisions of the. commission under delegated powers and judgments of the ECJ as well as Regulations which become binding on member states immediately they are made without any reference to national ( or, as the EU would term them) “Municipal” legislatures.
In looking at a piece of legislation, you cannot generally tell whether it originated as an EU requirement . It might, for instance, be an obscure clause in a Statutory Instrument.
I think it is over ten years ago that one MP had a bright idea - that every item required by EU law - clause, sentence, paragraph, Statutory Instrument or Act - should be clearly identified as to its origin. He was Mark Harper and he introduced the requirement by a ten minute rule Bill which unfortunately did not prosper. Independence campaigners found that he was very difficult to contact. Not long afterwards he was made a junior minister and so was lost to the independence movement . This was the time when Mr Cameron wanted to stop MPs “banging on about Europe”.
Who cares, Ed?
What matters is that it be good law, not who conceived it.
Most of our underlying property law comes from the Normans, and through them from the Romans, for instance.
Looks like JPM has discovered Wikipedia...
" A handful of lefty professors are also partly to blame." from Span Ows. More like a bushel of them from where I'm standing. I seriously doubt whether there are a dozen professors in our top ten universities who voted Conservative in the General Election, but we will never know. The CRE statistic that only 8% of primary school teachers are Conservative is a telling one.
As to the recent elevation of NM I anticipate her being the thorn in the Lords' side when discussion of broadcasting happens. She is on record as saying when Culture Secretary that she could see no objection to replacing the BBC license with a subscription arrangement. She might yet achieve something useful of note in her parliamentary career.
Are people confusing professors with lecturers ?
A professor runs a whole department and does little or no teaching. Professors will be much involved with getting money for research, new laboratories, etc; and as they are used to applying to the EU for some of this money, they will mostly be remainers. They may well be left wing.
The teaching is done by lecturers, both full and part time. Part time lecturers will mostly have other jobs -- for instance, a lecturer in graphic design may run his or her own design practice. They are too busy teaching their subjects to talk about politics. How could you drag politics into courses on Industrial Design, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, or Games Programming ?
anon: the original comment was re PPE (who is to blame? profs/lecturers/whomever...)
This list was from 2009...about New labour but adding others:
David Miliband (PPE degree from Oxford)
Ed Miliband (PPE degree from Oxford)
James Purnell (PPE degree from Oxford)
Ed Balls (PPE degree from Oxford).
Jaqui Smith (PPE oxford)
Yvette Cooper (PPE oxford)
Ruth Kelly (PPE oxford)
Peter Mandelson (PPE oxford)
And hey, if the proles want a bit of a change we could always elect
David Cameron (PPE oxford)
William Hague (PPE oxford)
...and if we wanted to really push the boat out we could go crazy and go for a crazy liberal like
Chris Huhne (PPE oxford)
Is it any wonder that all our politicians say the same thing? The most influential political figures in British politics are the Oxford PPE lecturers...
And the proles could hear about it through the wonderful media:
Stephanie Flanders (PPE oxford)
Rupert Murdoch (PPE oxford)
Nick Robinson (PPE oxford)
Nick Cohen (PPE oxford)
Michael Crick (PPE oxford)
Krishnan Guru-Murthy (PPE oxford)
John Sergeant (PPE oxford)
James Robbins (PPE oxford)
Evan Davis (PPE oxford)
David Dimbleby (PPE oxford)
@Span Ows
Quite, and a more graphic illustration of C P Snow's two cultures its difficult to imagine.
So the criticism is of the excessive influence of one course at one university ?
It seems a bit harsh to assume that a lecturer in Electronics at Teesside University will have the same political views.
Don Cox
(My degree is in Zoology from Oxford. Politics is really just a small branch of zoology, as you can see by observing the primates in the House of Commons.)
Imagine all these PPE types on a desert island.
Bikini atoll 1946 would be ideal.
Why should studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford make one less suited to public life than the Classics, as Al Johnson read there?
Margaret Beckett did metallurgy, John Prescott was a ship's waiter, and Dennis Skinner was a miner, for what it's worth.
@JPM
Because you end up with a self selecting priesthood who hire and associate with no one but people like themselves.
Thatcher was chemistry and law: Merkel was physics. PPE is an intellectual cop-out: not a discipline in any sense.
I'd check up on that, Terence.
http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listing/philosophy-politics-and-economics
PPE=Scum--mostly scum in the Cheese's mould.
JPM - the Literae Humaniores degree that Boris undertook is a very different kettle of fish from PPE. It takes four years and requires fluency in Latin and Ancient Greek. The list of graduates bears testimony to its rigour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literae_humaniores#Distinguished_graduates_in_mods_and_greats
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