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Independence of the Judiciary

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) on securing an important debate. He set out the ground very well. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg) also touched on important issues about the self-restraint that politicians need to show when talking about legal cases and decisions. It is important to recognise the long-standing convention that politicians do not interfere in the work of the courts lightly. One can go back as far even as Churchill in the dark days of the second world war. He was anxious to stress that the power of the Executive should be exercised with restraint and that we should respect our legal system and the independence of judges. He said:"““The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law…is in the highest degree odious””." We should remember that history and that tradition as something that is not just in the past but is living and breathing. It is part of the very important constitutional arrangement that we have in this country, to which the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey referred—the separation of the powers of Parliament, the judiciary and the Executive. The only point that I would make to him is that it has never been quite as simple as that. All those aspects were represented one within the other. I am sure that that has been one reason why we have not had in the UK the gridlock that there has been in America. I am referring to the idea that Parliament had the Ministers within it and that the senior judge—the Lord Chancellor—was a member of the Cabinet and of the Parliament and that the Parliament had the Leaders of the Houses within it and the Cabinet had them as well. We did not come upon all those relationships by accident and we tinker with them at our peril. One comment that the Lord Chancellor made in his Mansion house speech—I always enjoy his comments—was about reaching an accommodation over the Constitutional Reform Bill. He said:"““I take no credit for stumbling from the cigarette packet to the solution.””" There is more than a grain of truth in that. It was a back-of-the-fag-packet job in the beginning, and it was only after a lot of hard work—Lord Woolf must take a good deal of credit for it—that the Government were forced to confront issues that they had simply not thought about. As hon. Members will recall, the great mission in the reshuffle was to get rid of Lord Irvine. They could not think how to do it, and eventually someone came up with the bright idea, ““Let’s abolish the role,”” so the role of Lord Chancellor, which had been with us for more than 1,000 years, was scrapped to get rid of Lord Irvine. That was such an ill-thought-through package that the Lord Chief Justice was telephoned five minutes before the press announcement was to be made; that was the consultation. There were 400 amendments as the Bill was considered. It was an example of how not do to constitutional change; but enough of that.