Just as with immigration, there is a limit to what even the most combative minister can do if the legislative and institutional factors underpinning an issue are not addressed.
The Supreme Court could only decide it had the power to strike down legislation if it already possessed that power. Authority cannot be established by appeal to itself.
Day to day, it is much more congenial to be a “steady hand on the tiller”, even if this is a terrible quality in the captain of a ship going in the wrong direction.
Whether the approach taken – of trying to avoid a head-on collision with our international obligations by seeking to overrule them in specific cases – will prove effective, either here or in the long term, is an open question.
Devolution was supposed to mean that different parts of the UK could experiment, with best practice eventually being taken up elsewhere to the benefit of all. Instead, devocrats have often done everything they can to thwart cross-border comparisons altogether.
Moreover, how to do so without confronting any hard trade-offs or admitting any fundamental shortcomings with the UK’s economic model after 13 years of the party being in government.
It is one thing to insist that the executive operates within the constraints of the law; it is quite another, and grossly improper, to claim that the Government cannot try to pass new legislation to alter those constraints.
Based on recent experience, Fifield seems the most plausible favourite, given associations seem often to favour selecting local councillors. We wish all three the very best of luck.
Also: Delays in SNP fraud investigation risk impression of cover-up, senior lawyers warn.
Michael Gove’s decision to broach the subject at the Covid Inquiry has stirred up some of the old partisan divisions from the pandemic.
It is much easier to defend the sanctity of the collection in toto than to start making difficult and diplomatically awkward judgements about the return of individual artefacts on a case-by-case basis.
Without understanding what parts of the status quo are propped up by the mass import of people, and how, and why, any move to cut headline numbers is going to run aground on the consequences of so doing.
Our chosen model is grossly unjust and will have many horrible consequences. But it already has, and yet it ticks along, because those consequences are not evenly spread.
Also: Another woeful week for the SNP as its health minister refuses to resign over £11k roaming fee and Yousaf defies calls for an ethics inquiry into allegations he misled the Scottish Parliament.
He said at conference that: “I’d be very surprised if I were not Conservative leader by ‘26. Very surprised.” Even if he was joking (and he insisted he wasn’t, at first), that’s the sort of jest that’s never entirely a jest.