Impartial courts

sir – Charles Moore (Comment, December 21) is right about the courts.

We expect to have an independent judiciary, by which we mean judges immune to outside influence, applying the law in a fair and predictable manner. We do not want judges free to impose their personal political and social morality upon the rest of us. That, however, is what we now have, as displayed by a range of recent judgments, from that of the Supreme Court on government use of prerogative powers to that of the judge supporting the dismissal of a researcher for expressing the widely held view that gender is real and not a state of mind – a perfectly valid opinion.

Today’s prescriptive “liberal” establishment, which has taken control of the courts as well as the BBC and other national institutions, has forgotten that liberalism is first and foremost about personal liberty and free speech. Our judges were unduly empowered by Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act of 1998, which disastrously brought Britain under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, freeing judges from the sensible constraints of the British common law system that produces outcomes based on precedent.

The rule of law is not the rule of lawyers – as it is in the Lord Chancellor’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera Iolanthe:

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.

Gregory Shenkman

London W8

sir – The unanimity of 11 judges on an issue as complex as the prorogation of Parliament, highlighted by Kevin O’sullivan (Letters, December 30), is what I found so unbelievable.

By a miracle, which I call democracy, the British public passed its own judgment on the anti-brexit propaganda peddled by assorted organisations, political groups and the usual luvvies. This resulted in a rout of Boris’s opponents – caught in a web of their own making?

Sandra Jones

Old Cleeve, Somerset