CP
At last, someone is speaking with the bracing clarity of common sense: the judges, the quangos, the civil service mandarins, the whole meta-bureaucratic class, must once again answer to the people, not to their own self-sustaining guild of groupthink.
For too long, the machinery of government has been run not by those who win elections, but by those who never have to face them. The faceless have become the fearless. The unelected have become untouchable.
Jenrick has looked at the wreckage of modern British governance (the endless “independent” commissions, the alphabet soup of boards and offices, the Kafkaesque tangle of oversight bodies) and said what everyone knows but nobody dares say: it’s not independence; it’s insulation.
Quangos must be quashed.
The Blair-era “modernisation” of the constitution, that shiny project of post-political managerialism, has bred an entire ecosystem of self-reinforcing power. The Judicial Appointments Commission, Blair’s Frankenstein creation, was sold as taking the politics out of judging. What it did, of course, was the complete opposite. It took democracy out of it instead.
Now, instead of judges being appointed by an elected Lord Chancellor accountable to Parliament, they are handpicked by a body accountable to precisely no one.
Jenrick’s proposal is refreshingly radical precisely because it restores something we’ve lost: democratic oversight. Returning judicial appointments to the Lord Chancellor is not a lurch into authoritarianism, as the pearl-clutchers of the Guardian and the Labour benches will cry. It is the reclamation of the demos… rule by the people through those they elect.
If the judiciary is to serve the public, it must be drawn from, and answerable to, the public realm.
Bias masquerading as virtue
The problem isn’t just that some judges may once have championed open borders. It’s that many still think doing so is an act of moral superiority. They cloak political activism in the robes of judicial neutrality and then bristle when called to account.
No one doubts that Britain has some of the finest legal minds in the world. But impartiality is not an academic state of grace; it is a discipline. And if you spend years campaigning against deportations and then ascend to rule on deportation cases, that discipline is, to put it mildly, compromised.
This isn’t “attacking judges”; it’s defending justice. A register of judicial interests, a vetting board for appointments, the power to remove those who violate neutrality, these are not threats to the rule of law, they are its safeguards.
The great obstruction machine
Let’s also be candid about the wider picture. The civil service, the quangos, the legal establishment, together they have become a kind of institutional immune system against political change.
Every time Parliament tries to do something genuinely bold (Brexit, Rwanda, border control, deregulation) the same antibodies swarm: “human rights obligations”, “judicial reviews”, “process concerns”. The goal isn’t balance. It’s blockage. Again and again and again.
Britain cannot function if the permanent government has veto power over the elected one.
Jenrick’s plan doesn’t just aim to reform the judiciary. It’s an opening salvo in the long-overdue war to reassert democratic primacy over the unelected empire that Tony Blair quietly built.
Courage, Conservatives
Of course, the question is: will the Conservatives actually do it? Maybe Jenrick is the leader the Conservative Party needs. He gets it and if the Tories want to survive, they must become the party of the people’s state, not the bureaucrat’s one.
Britain is not crying out for more process. It is crying out for accountability, for grip, for someone… anyone… to seize the controls and say, “Enough.”
Jenrick sees that this is not about left or right, but about the simple principle that the people who make the laws, and the people who interpret them, must both be answerable to the same ultimate authority: the electorate.
So yes, let’s have the vetting board. Let’s restore appointments to the Lord Chancellor. Let’s scrap the Sentencing Council and its absurd “two-tier” justice guidelines. Let’s leave the ECHR.
And for heaven’s sake, let’s stop apologising for wanting our institutions to serve the nation that pays for them. Because democracy, real democracy, is not just the right to vote. It’s the right to have that vote mean something. Robert Jenrick, to his great credit, has remembered that.
Here is Robert Jenrick’s article as it appeared in the Telegraph:
There should be no place for judges tweeting political opinions
By Robert Jenrick
We have some of the best lawyers, barristers and judges in the world. But we’ve got a problem. I have concerns that some judges have strongly held beliefs which have the potential to subvert the impartiality of the judiciary.
More than 30 sitting immigration judges have former links to the very activist groups that have ground our court system to a halt. Can judges who have supported and volunteered for organisations and charities such as Bail for Immigration Detainees – whose stated policy is to “work towards a world free of immigration detention” and where no one is “deported from their homes” – be considered to be neutral and unbiased?
Maybe they can, but it is time that we raise these questions. These are not isolated examples; they point to a judiciary where activism and adjudication seem to go together.
The problem goes beyond the effect of any decisions these judges have reached. The rule of law relies on the public having confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary – that the person hearing the cases they bring appears to be a neutral arbitrator.
If judges are tweeting political opinions that directly touch on the policies they’re charged with mediating upon, that confidence is shattered. That’s why I feel so strongly that these people should have no place in our justice system.
Judges to be appointed by Lord Chancellor
So, today, I am announcing a bold new approach for how judges are appointed and how they’re removed. At present, judges are appointed and disciplined by quangos.
The first problem is that the Judicial Conduct Investigation Office routinely hands biased judges warnings rather than dismissing them.
The second problem goes much deeper, though – who picks the judges in our courts. Tony Blair handed the job to the Judicial Appointments Commission. Many of the Commissioners are doing a good job, others less so.
Our new plan would see judges appointed again by the Lord Chancellor – an elected minister accountable to the public. A new vetting board will scrutinise their background for any sign of bias, of whichever political hue.
Meanwhile, biased judges will be sacked automatically. If necessary, Parliament will invoke its ancient power to remove judges from the senior courts.
These reforms aren’t radical; they restore the position we had in this country before Blair’s constitutional vandalism.
But to members of the judiciary who object, let me say this. If you had kept your house in order, there would have been no need for these reforms. The public expects the courts to be impartial. Nothing less is acceptable.
Robert Jenrick is the Conservative MP for Newark, as well as shadow secretary of state of state for justice.
.Featured image: Alamy
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