Monday 18 October 2021

The killing of David Amess

The horrific killing of Conservative MP Sir David Amess in his surgery in Leigh-on-Sea last week was profoundly shocking and you can only feel desperately sorry for his family, friends, staff and constituents.  He was by all accounts a nice chap who worked hard to help solve all the many issues his constituents brought to him. His death was shocking but can we honestly say it was a surprise?  The killing of Jo Cox in Birstall was just five years ago and for MPs of all parties, daily threats have become normalised.

Yvette Cooper’s former office manager Jade Botterill, said on Twitter that she quit because of the death threats, once reporting 100 in a single week, although half that number had come to be regarded as the usual average.

We are talking about a Yorkshire MP getting perhaps seven or more death threats every day. When did that become reasonable?  She almost seems to imply she could have managed if there had been two or three a day. Personally, one would be enough for me, I don't know how they do it.

Nobody forces an MP to stand for election but unless some people are prepared to do the job, democracy will die and we will all pay the price.  An MP is often the last resort of the desperate and it is not surprising that constituency surgeries are often the venue for a robust exchange of views. I assume that was always so, but death threats?

My kids worked in local shops to earn a bit of money when they were at college and both say that dealing with members of the public is the worst part of the job. Many are aggressive, demanding and totally unreasonable.  I honestly think this was new and it has certainly got worse since then I'm sure. Social media is partly to blame. It's full of the most appalling language and people hide behind a pseudonym to pour out really shocking vitriol on anyone that disagrees with them.  The press is no better - with The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Express feeding and goading the beast of public outrage every day.

I don't think you can argue that political discourse in Britain has somehow escaped this change and in some ways it is even partly responsible for it. Only a few days ago our own MP Nigel Adams was caught on camera telling a protester to f*** off while walking alongside parliament. Can anybody imagine Ted Heath doing that?  Or Harold Wilson?

No, our standards have I am afraid fallen a long way.  Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have a moral duty to turn down the rhetoric, to avoid demonising opponents in and out of the House of Commons and lead by example.  But I doubt they can do it.

Dominic Raab

Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom and a lawyer, has an article in The Sunday Telegraph which has sparked off a rapid response from the legal profession. He says he will 'overhaul' the Human Rights Act and seems to be arguing for ministers to become judges: This is what he says: 

Asked about his plans to reform the Human Rights Act, Mr Raab revealed that he is devising a "mechanism" to allow the Government to introduce ad hoc legislation to "correct" court judgments that ministers believe are "incorrect".

"We want the Supreme Court to have a last word on interpreting the laws of the land, not the Strasbourg court....[]. We also want to protect and preserve the prerogatives of Parliament from being whittled away by judicial legislation, abroad or indeed at home."

A lot of people, Jolyon Maugham included, have pointed out that we already have such a mechanism, it’s called parliament. Raab seems to think ministers should be able to decide what Parliament intended if the courts interpret a law in some unforeseen way that embarrasses ministers.

This is a bit of a shock. Raab is himself a lawyer so it’s perhaps doubly shocking. 

Mark Ellliot, professor of public law at Cambridge has a long and thoughtful thread in response.

Elliot says we should be concerned "if the Government is inclined to reduce the courts' judicial review powers simply because courts make decisions that it finds uncomfortable. Government's willingness to accept such discomfort is a prerequisite in a rule of law based democracy."

And he suggests Raab wants the [UK] Supreme Court to have the last word ... not the Strasbourg Court' - the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR) and says it "implies a similar mindset to the one unpinning last week's story about possibility of blowing up the NI Protocol with respect to the role of the EU Court of Justice."

That mindset, says Elliot, assumes the UK can legislate its way out of its international law obligations and is a view based on a "legally illiterate form of British exceptionalism founded on a misunderstanding of parliamentary sovereignty."

As with the NI Protocol, the professor says, Britain is bound in international law by its obligations under the ECHR. Article 46(1) requires the British government to abide by judgments of the EHCR in Strasbourg.  No amount of UK legislation can change the position in international law.

I don't think any of this will happen anyway but I think it does demonstrate a certain authoritarian mindset. Raab is I believe the son of a Czech refugee and I sometimes think people who have been under the yoke of a communist government for years, tend to go too far the other way once released. It's the Viktor Orban, Polish Law and Justice party syndrome isn't it?  Perhaps this is where Raab got his political philosophy from?

What Raab's rise to become deputy PM tells us is just how far we have fallen and that's the worst of it.

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