Member

Putting history to one side, removing the Lord Chancellor from the House of Lords was a corollary of New Labour’s decision to take the role of your Lordships’ House as the highest appeal court in the land away from it and to pass it to the Supreme Court on the other side of Parliament Square. All these parts of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 have to be read as a package. What we have lost is this: the Lord Chancellor occupied, and to an extent still occupies, an important role in our Constitution and in our government. Judges do not take an oath that refers to the rule of law, but there is someone who does, and that someone is the Lord Chancellor. The Lord Chancellor takes an oath with three distinct parts. The first references respect for the rule of law, the second underpins the independence of the judiciary and the third deals with the provision of resources for the efficient and effective support of the courts. Those three parts are, of course, interlinked.