I thank my noble friend the Minister. I realise what she is saying and acknowledge the care with which she is saying it; I thank her very much for that. I tried to intervene earlier specifically on the issue that President Trump had said what he said. The Minister said that we had to realise that that was an election situation. She then moved on to the Prime Minister. I put this to her: how happy would she be if our Prime Minister got up during an election and said, “I am very pleased that there are 181 judges that I have managed to get appointed, who will make decisions much closer to the Conservative Party’s views than the judges whom they replaced.”? I think that she would be deeply upset and would feel that that struck at the very heart of British justice. I am trying to make the point that the United States makes political decisions about judges, who are very often able to act in support of American business. In fact, this is one of the issues that President Trump has always raised—“America first”. My concern is that there is an actual case where that appears to be what happened. I do not think that it helps us to give the impression that the United States’ legal system is on a par with that of Switzerland, because it is not.
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I also ask my noble friend to reply to the noble and learned Lord opposite, who made a very important point about this, which is that if we say this about one country that is so different in a group such as this, we also say it about that group. It would be better if we offered Parliament the chance to make a decision on each country. In this case, it would be better not to give the impression that we were doing this because we wanted a favour from the United States on trade. That is what it looks and sounds like. Having read what the Prime Minister said, that is what I think. It is about doing nicely with the United States. The point about other countries that the noble Lord opposite made is a dangerous one.