We have one over there. Another fought Lord Roberts of Conwy for Plaid Cymru and there was even a Conservative contender, for a valleys seat in south Wales. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, and particularly welcome his support for the A55—a north Wales road, I note—which runs into the Irish Sea, and the new Irish border, somewhere to the west of South Stack, Holyhead.
The well-worn track, however, between the Temple and Westminster was becoming rocky. For a young barrister, political involvement risked a black mark. None of the current Supreme Court justices appears to have had a juvenile fling at politics, although I note that one of them once owned a racehorse called, provocatively, “Young Radical”—something we all thought we were. Now there are these vague proposals, in the Conservative manifesto and in the Queen’s Speech, to establish a constitution, democracy and rights commission. Protecting the Constitution, the paper published by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange on 28 December, expresses alarm at the entry of the Supreme Court into the political arena. The authors appear to see the Supreme Court justices, hitherto political virgins, coming together as a collective body with a determination to seize political control and promulgate new laws. We heard an echo of that in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who referred to “imaginative” new laws.
It is a highly regressive document, even calling for the removal of the title of “Supreme Court” and reverting to the wording of the Victorian Act of 1876 when Lords of Appeal in Ordinary were created to man the Judicial Committee. The authors of the paper write:
“If appeals against judgments were reviewed, in the words of section 4 of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876, before Her Majesty the Queen in her Court of Parliament, it might be much less likely that the UK’s apex appellate court would mistake its position in relation to the Houses of Parliament.”
Accordingly, this paper—the basis of Tory policy—calls for the renaming of the Supreme Court as the “Upper Appeals Court” to emphasise its inferiority to the political sovereignty of Parliament and the Executive. That may not be quite compatible with the concept of independence of the judiciary as the third pillar of our democracy. Are we on the way to Philadelphia?
6.10 pm