Now the courts can’t be trusted to save us
ONCE I flew in the front seat of a two-seater Harrier jump jet. I was even allowed to play with the controls a little when we were safely airborne (if you were in North Wales at the time, I apologise for any alarm I may have caused when I swooped a bit).
I felt extraordinarily safe, partly because the actual pilot was so good at his job, but also because of all the careful procedures and devices in place: the fire-retardant gloves, the helmet and visor, the line of explosives which would blow the cockpit canopy apart if I had to use the ejector seat, and the ejector seat itself.
Something similar used to be said of this country. We had so many safety devices to keep us free. Parliament, which we elected in free and fair elections, could throw out a bad government. A vigilant and independent press would spot and attack wrongdoing on high. And perhaps, above all, the courts would pull up any government which exceeded its power.
Well, that all turned out to be false. You can’t call most of the media lapdogs. It is an insult to lapdogs. Parliament has been not so much supine but spread-eagled, asking to be trampled on. But the courts have finally shown that they can no longer be trusted to save us at all.
Often, it is the courts which nobly stand up to tyrants. Not here. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to hear Simon Dolan’s last attempt to get judges to review the Government’s shocking abuse of the Public Health Act 1984 to seize tyrannical powers, and hang on to them.
It wasn’t just that they did not support Mr Dolan’s case. They would not even hear it. How can that be? Lord
Sumption, himself a former Supreme Court judge and a brilliant legal mind, has suggested strongly that the Johnson Government’s use of the 1984 Act is beyond its powers. There is plainly a case to be discussed.
Yet Mr Dolan has been met with slammed doors and stony faces at every long step on the way up to the highest court in the land. Contrast that with the treatment the same courts gave to Gina Miller’s two challenges to the Government – one over the EU and the other over prorogation of Parliament. She won both.
As it happens, I thought she was in the right the first time, and wrong
If the law won’t help, how can we get out of this mess?
the second, but that is not the point. Both cases deserved to be heard and tested. Like Mr Dolan, she was disputing the Government’s power to act in arbitrary, bullying ways, which the law is designed to prevent.
Our legal classes are supposed to be terribly concerned about human rights and freedom. Yet when the Government introduces mass house arrest, destroys businesses and tells us who we can meet and who we can hug, the judiciary says, ‘not our affair’.
The ejector seat is broken. I do not know how, if the law won’t help, we can lawfully get out of this horrible mess.