It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair again, Mr Twigg, and to follow the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). I have great respect for her as a lawyer; we do not always agree in our political views, but I take seriously what she says on legal matters. I ought to mention my interests as a non-practising member of the English Bar, as a consultant to a law firm and as a bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. I will start with the topic of the debate: the Lord Chancellor’s oath. The hon. and learned Lady ranged widely in her speech, and I am sure she will forgive me if I do not follow some particular matters that she understandably raised relating to the constitutional settlement and devolution.
The irony of this debate is that the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 does indeed place the Lord Chancellor in a different position from that of other Ministers,
both because of the oath and because of their obligation under section 17(1) of the 2005 Act to respect the rule of law and defend the independence of the judiciary. Ironically, the Blair Government in 2005 never actually defined the rule of law in the Act. The late Lord Bingham, who has been much quoted already in this debate and probably will be again, noted that that was interesting and rather unusual, as it placed great reliance on a concept that was set out in statute but never defined. That, he concluded, clearly was not an accident; it was clearly because it was probably impossible, if not unhelpful, to find a pithy statutory definition that could be put in an Act of Parliament of something that has evolved over time. His conclusion in his admirable book, which I brought along this morning, is that it was desirable to leave the matter to be decided—as courts might need to, from time to time—in the practical, rather than purely in the abstract, as issues arose. That, perhaps, is wise.
That means that it was wrong for some in recent weeks, since the arrival of the United Kingdom Internal Market Bill, to make rather unjustified ad hominem attacks on the current Lord Chancellor—first, on his conduct throughout, and secondly, in making an assertion that the rule of law is potentially breached. An assertion is, of course, no more than that, and a legal argument, however distinguished, be it made by academic or legal commentators, is no more than that either. I have known the Lord Chancellor for his whole professional career, and the reality is that he is absolutely rooted in his commitment to the rule of law and to the profession, as he made clear when he took his oath and repeatedly since. I will come to part 5 of the Bill in a moment, about which my views are well known. However, I believe and am satisfied that the Lord Chancellor has acted diligently throughout all this to ensure that we deal with a potentially difficult situation proportionately and consistent with our obligations.
Since taking, the Lord Chancellor has also been clear in his support for the independence and integrity of the judiciary. Not all his predecessors in recent years have been; I say that frankly. There are people in all jurisdictions that we might wish to brush over, as the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West put it. For every Lord Rich there is a Lord Braxfield, perhaps, and others who we might not wish to dwell upon. The reality is that the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), has been meticulous in this. I welcome his clear commitment in his letter to the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, to the Government’s continuing support for the provisions of the European convention on human rights. He has been willing to be outspoken on that.
Reference was made to the risk to the rule of law being undermined by the Government’s proposals to examine the scope of judicial review. When I started my law degree at the London School of Economics—which was, I hate to say, in the early 1970s—judicial review was a very new and evolving legal concept. There was little of it in those days. It grew, as many of us will remember, through the Gouriet judgment, the Grunwick case and so on, and perhaps rightly so. There has never been a fixed corpus of law in this area, as there is in
others, such as jury trial. There is nothing wrong in that; the advantage of the common-law system is that it can evolve.
No one would seriously say that, prior to the development of the current system of judicial review in, let us say, the 1970s through to the beginning of this century, Britain was not a country that was subject to the rule of law. A willingness to review the way in which judicial review as a concept operates, and what are or are not the proper limits, cannot be regarded as an assault on the rule of law per se, on any objective basis.