Sir Keir plans crackdown on Just Stop Oil zealots if he wins election
LABOUR is drawing up plans to hit Just Stop Oil eco-zealots with stiffer sentences if Sir Keir Starmer takes his party into government.
Sir Keir, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, is said to be determined to crack down on ecoprotesters who have blocked emergency services and created misery for people across Britain.
The Mail on Sunday understands Labour is looking at issuing guidance to judges to hand down tougher sentences where possible. However, the party is also calling on greater use of injunctions to curb the behaviour of protesters who glue themselves to roads to cause maximum disruption.
A source close to him said Sir Keir ‘just fundamentally believes there’s a right and respectful way of doing things and this sort of behaviour irritates him something rotten. He’s fired up.’
Earlier this year, Labour urged the Government to make greater use of nationwide injunctions to prevent Just Stop Oil protesters disrupting the delivery of fuel to garage forecourts.
Last night, Steve Reed, Shadow Justice Secretary, said: ‘Our brave emergency services are being held up from helping those in distress, and lives have been put at risk. On top of that, the public has been stopped from going about their everyday business.’
Mr Reed added: ‘When the ecozealots return to cause their latest round of counterproductive misery, Labour will clamp down on their disruptive nonsense and use all means available to get injunctions in place. We stand firmly on the side of the public.’
Last month, Sir Keir branded the actions of the eco-warriors ‘arrogant’ and wrong. Speaking on LBC, he tore into protesters for blocking ambulances. He said: ‘I don’t know how they can look in the eye the families who’ve got someone in the back of an ambulance.
‘They certainly wouldn’t be able to look me in the eye if it was my mum – late mum now, sadly – who was in that ambulance.’
DO YOU want to know why the Just Stop Oil fanatics manage to cause so much chaos? It is because of New Labour’s Left-wing Supreme Court, which has made the police and the law so feeble when faced with green zealots blocking motorways and roads.
This grandiose tribunal, whose very existence has given liberal judges more power, should really be called the Blair Court. It has existed only since 2009. It decided in June last year that deliberately blocking a road as part of a protest amounted to a lawful excuse for obstructing the highway. You will not be surprised to learn that this verdict relied on ‘human rights’.
Protester Nora Ziegler and three companions were found not to have broken the law, even though there was no doubt that in 2017 they had blocked a road, a straightforward breach of the 1980 Highways Act.
Those who make up our supposedly Conservative Government have never understood the revolution the Blairites inflicted on Britain. Many support it, the rest don’t care.
Hence the futile rage of Home Secretary Suella Braverman against the soft attitude of the police towards the recent motorway blockades. I’m the last person to make excuses for the police, a pathetic body who badly need to be replaced from top to bottom. But on this occasion they are just behaving as the courts have told them to.
If Ms Braverman really wants to make any difference, she should first get Parliament to reverse, by clear legislation, the Supreme Court verdict on the Ziegler case.
Then she should get the Cabinet to abolish the Blair Court, 12 selfimportant judges sitting in a minipalace on Parliament Square. Britain managed without such a thing for centuries and can easily do so again. Parliament is supreme in this country. There cannot therefore be a ‘Supreme Court’.
Just before it began work in 2009, its future President, Lord Neuberger, warned that there was a real risk of ‘judges arrogating to themselves greater power than they have at the moment’. Around the same time Lord Falconer, the onetime flatmate of Sir Anthony Blair who rose to become Lord Chancellor, exulted in the change. He said he ‘happily predicted’ that the Supreme Court would be ‘bolder in vindicating both the freedoms of individuals and, coupled with that, being willing to take on the executive’.
By bolder, he meant, more aggressive, and of course more revolutionary, just as he was. And the sorts of ‘freedoms’ he had in mind would be the freedoms beloved by Blairites, the vague and flexible human rights which have made it so very hard to enforce old-fashioned common-sense law in recent years.
THREE years ago, Lord Neuberger, by then retired, explained the huge powers of the US Supreme Court to give orders to Congress and the President. He told students in Cambridge: ‘We can’t do that.’ But he didn’t quite mean it, for he added: ‘We get round that, the judges get round that, by what Baldrick might call a “cunning and subtle plan’’ of being able to “interpret’’ statutes, and sometimes we interpret them quite, um, imaginatively.’
Unlike their namesakes in the US, who face public and often bruising Senate hearings before being appointed, the UK’s Supreme Court justices are picked without any scrutiny by Parliament. Worse, they are chosen by Downing Street from a body of senior judges which has become increasingly politically correct. How many Premiers have the knowledge needed to make such choices? In any case, are there any conservative candidates?
I ask because the Blairites also installed the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) in 2005. This body has – how shall I put it? – perhaps not rushed to appoint socially conservative judges at any level. A proper conservative Government would abolish the JAC, too.
Next, they should repeal the dangerous decision to make the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) part of UK law. Our law already has plenty of tough protections of freedom. As it happens, we are a lot less free to act and speak since the ECHR was brought into our law. This vague document just licenses judges to make political rulings instead of legal ones. And if the judges are overwhelmingly liberal, then it is no surprise they use the ECHR to change our laws in a Leftward direction.
I cannot begin to tell you how much damage was done to the country by the Blairites, politically, socially, educationally, legally, internationally and economically. It is vast. But until we realise that the 1997-2010 Government was an actual revolution, which we must reverse if we are to survive as a nation, then we will just flounder, shouting uselessly as the destruction of our way of life continues.