Dr Kieran Mullan

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker; they do not want to hear it. The root cause of the issue is that the Prime Minister appointed an Attorney General—the Government’s own Law Officer—who is steeped in judicial activism. The Prime Minister himself practised in a chambers that relished it and wholeheartedly supported its expansion case by case. For anyone interested in a treatise on the risk of this approach—from someone much more qualified than me, as I am sure the House will agree—I encourage them to listen to Lord Sumption’s Reith lecture. His analysis on the divide between matters that should properly be the domain of politics and matters for law could not be more pertinent. He said: “It is a vice of some lawyers that they talk about law as if it was a self-contained subject, something to be examined like a laboratory specimen in a test tube, but law does not occupy a world of its own. It is part of a larger system of public decision making. The rest is politics. The politics of ministers and legislators of political parties, of media and pressure groups, and of the wider electorate.” Lord Sumption went on to say: “The Courts have developed a broader concept of the…law which greatly enlarges their own constitutional role. They have claimed a wider supervisory authority over other organs of the State. They have inched their way towards a notion of fundamental law overriding the ordinary processes of political decision-making, and these things have inevitably carried them into the realms of legislative and ministerial policy. To adopt the famous dictum of the German military theorist Clausewitz about war, law is now the continuation of politics by other means.” Be in no doubt: this whole sorry episode has been an exquisite further example of that mentality, this time from the Sentencing Council and its members as part of the wider judiciary establishment. The Lord Chancellor has failed to act decisively today. If she continues to refrain from taking decisive action, we will be here again and again, with the Opposition making sure, on each and every step of the way, that voters know where the sympathies of the Labour party and its leader lie: not with the ordinary, law-abiding citizen who expects equal treatment under the law and the democratically elected politicians of this country deciding on policy, but with activists and campaigning lawyers who want to wrestle control from them. The Bill is barely adequate—barely. We will not oppose it, because it is better than nothing—and at least it tells the public everything that they need to know about those who sit on the Government Benches, and about the mentality of the man leading them. Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time.