This week in the UK, we’ve gone from the Rule of Law to the Rule of Six and now that the Justice Secretary has said he’ll only resign if the law his government breaks is one he agrees with…
We’ve gone from the Rule of Six to the Rule of One.
Throw in this pensée from the (legally trained) Northern Ireland minister:
And we’ve got a systematic undermining of the Rule of Law from those whose job it is to maintain it.
And none of this, believe me, is an accident.
This is all part of a decades-long plan by the extreme right to abolish constraints on the State’s power to trample our, er, rights.
Note the rationale of long-term UK Cabinet Minister Michael Gove when he opposed the peace in Ireland in his 2000 anti-Belfast/Good Friday Agreement tract:
Gove opposed the peace because he feared a “culture of human rights” from Northern Ireland would infect the rest of the United Kingdom.
Imagine!
Well, if this culture of dissing the universality of human rights itself takes hold, imagine all these lawyers who’ll no longer have a job – in the courts it will become an acceptable defense to claim:
“Well, yes, Your Honour, I did break the law. But it wasn’t a law I agreed with.”
You can do anything now and get off scot free.
The Attorney General, on the other hand, has been quoted as saying explicitly that if a rule with legal status is neither enforced nor enforceable (in the Cabinet Manual) or such a rule can be changed at the whim of the PM (Cabinet Minister’s code of conduct) then it’s okay to breach that Rule of Law.
She even repeated all this yesterday to the Bar Council and grounded her assertion that the “Ministerial Code” would not be breached by a Minister who facilitated a breach of international law by citing the Cabinet Secretary who has apparently “ruled” such a breach of the Code (and law of the land) would not be a breach.
I note that the Cabinet Secretary who ruled thus is an alumnus of Trinity College Cambridge. And that, alas, he has no legal qualifications whatsoever. Yet, his word’s taken as law by the Attorney General who has.
That Attorney General, whom I did read law with at Cambridge, has certainly got Alice in Wonderland down pat:
“…Braverman on Saturday dodged the question by stating that the code was not legally enforceable. Pressed, she suggested the cabinet secretary had ruled that the code would not be breached…”
And lest it be thought that this week is an anomaly, please note here my letter to the Guardian calling the Attorney General out, in all her pro-Brexit fervour, for repeating an anti-semitic trope that I doubt she fully comprehends:
Now, this is what the Lord Chancellor has to say about investigating past offences:
Oh, I almost forgot: this too was the week in which the Northern Ireland Backstop that Johnson resigned from Theresa May’s Cabinet over but which he turned into a Front Stop once he became PM is now being converted by Michael Gove into what he told Today yesterday on Radio 4 is a “Long Stop”.
Really, em, when those who have the power to influence events this week in Parliament hopefully will reflect that none of this is cricket.
It’s neither an effective negotiating ploy, nor is it likely to end well.
Why should international law trump municipal or domestic law?
During the 1930s and early 1940s much that was done in Germany and by the 3rd Reich that we consider abhorrent was done in conformity with domestic Rules of Law.
Enshrining the European Convention on Human Rights, Refugee Convention, Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties et al into domestic UK law is a trip wire.
The Attorney General and the Lord Chancellor as well those in Cabinet who allowed a Bill which was explicitly admitted to be a breach of the United Kingdom’s duty in International Law to go into the House of Commons failed at the first hurdle.
The UK has already breached the Good Faith provisions in the European Union Withdrawal Treaty.
I hope that that will be the extent of this terrible strategy being prosecuted by non-legally trained former journalists, enabled by Braverman and Buckland, who appear to know how to breach legal and moral rules, but not the value of what they are breaking.
To summarise my meaning, please allow me to leave you with the uncharacteristically terse tweet by the UK’s current government’s former attorney general Geoffrey Cox.
Mr Cox who, as Attorney General, himself had enabled the unlawful suspension of Parliament just after Johnson took over as prime minister clearly had reached the limit of his tolerance for law breaking when he posted this tweet:
“…Cox’s choice of a clip from the film of A Man for All Seasons is highly pertinent but, to understand it fully, you need to know the context.
“Sir Thomas More has just been confronted by Richard Rich, who is part of the network of spies Thomas Cromwell is using to gather information about him.
“Once Rich has gone, More is urged to arrest him.
“As More says:
“This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast and if you cut them down do you think you could really stand upright in the winds that would blow then? I give the devil benefit of the law for my own safety sake”…”
(the Guardian)
It’s worth perhaps making one final point.
The idea of a land’s prosperity being connected to the lawfulness of those who rule it is very ancient.
At the time of writing this almost 100,000 people a-day are contracting Covid.
1.5m children resident in the UK have been infected by the virus that causes Covid.
Just saying:
[excerpt from “Ireland and the Grail” by Professor John Carey]
P.S. Here I list 141 unprecedented attacks on the constitution:
UK Government’s 141 Greatest Hits – Brexit to Covid
Stephen Douglas studied international law at Trinity Hall Cambridge.
