It was promised “in our first year”. Instead, there will be mini-commissions, and a push to reform a Government bugbear: judicial review.
The decision illustrates how previous parliaments have freighted the process of policy-making with an increasingly onerous lattice of ill-defined obligations.
If there’s one thing which ought to unite even the most passionate partisans of the different proposals, it’s the abject state of British decision-making on infrastructure.
Plus: Will Javid come back? Will Boris Island fly? Hazzer, formerly the Duke of Sussex. And: an ice bath in a Scandi forest.
If governments are going to keep signing up to ‘legally-binding targets’, this sort of thing will continue to happen. Legislative indolence is the root of judicial power.
The latter will make much of the Government’s Constitution, Democracy & Rights Commission – promised in the Conservative Manifesto.
Tightening the definition of a “hate incident” would help. Our new Attorney General has a lot of work to do if public confidence is to be restored.
We cheer the mission. But government needs more compromise, art, tact and accomodation than campaigning alone allows.
For many lawyers and commentators, its ruling was an assertion of judicial power that cannot be justified by constitutional law or principle.
The political has been captured by the legal. Decisions of an executive, legislative and democratic nature have been assumed by our courts.
When Lord Kerr whistled, voters turned the Nelsonian equivalent of a deaf ear. When they whistled, he was dragged helplessly along by the command of a democratic vote.
To view Britain in such a way is to see a useless picture of the nation. Most people are Just About Managing. And they are our new voters.
Asserting the rights of Parliament over the EU is half the European mission. Asserting them over the ECHR is the other half.
Government and Parliament must limit judicial discretion in cases where there is a proven and ongoing risk to the public.
Lord Caine has projected a plan that would allow proceedings into suspected Troubles-related offences only if certificates are issued by senior legal figures.