The president of the UK Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, has spoken about the attacks on the judiciary made in the heat of the Article 50 case.
The Daily Mail ran a front page headline describing the Hugh Court judges who ruled the government did not have the power to unilaterally trigger Article 50 as ‘Enemies of the People‘.
“I think some of the things that were said risked undermining the judiciary, and unfairly undermining the judiciary, and therefore undermining the rule of law,” Neuberger told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
“If you have a free press these things can happen and to pretend it’s the end of civilisation, when these things happen once or twice, is wrong. If it became standard practice then I would be worried.”
Asked whether politicians had reacted quickly enough to defend the judiciary from attacks by the media, Neuberger said: “As far as the decision in the Supreme Court is concerned, the politicians reacted with exemplary speed and said, in my view, exactly what they should have said.”
“When the divisional court had given its judgement before that, I think the politicians acted slower than one would have hoped, and perhaps expressed themselves rather more pallidly than one would have hoped. But to be fair to politicians, like judges, they learn and after the Supreme Court decision they acted precisely as they should have done.”
Asked if the Supreme Court’s decision on the Article 50 case was evidence that judges were ‘out of touch’ with the county, Neuberger said: “We were doing what our job requires us to do which was taking a case which has been brought to court and dealing with it according to the law, and answering the issues that were presented to us in accordance with the law. To say that makes us out of touch I think misses the whole point of our function, which is to uphold the rule of law.”
Lord Neuberger retires this September, while the retirement of Lord Toulson last year, and the upcoming retirements of Lords Clarke, Mance, Hughes and Sumption before the end of 2018 mean there will be a series of vacancies to be filled on the Supreme Court. Applications to fill the first vacancies opened today.
It was an appalling headline. I hate to break Godwin’s law by immediately escalating the debate to a comparison with the Nazis, but it is factually correct that the Daily Mail’s headline was reminiscent of a headline displayed by the Nazis, with their attacks on judges, intellectuals and academics, all of who were opposed to their ‘racial purity’ laws, and anti-Jewish sentiment. Now, in no way, am I saying or claiming the Daily Mail, or any other newspaper is Nazi, or Fascist-leaning, but the headline did undermine the rule of law and the judiciary’s independence, and more to the point, conducted an an equally atrocious personal attack on them. Let’s not forget that the Nazis’ headline was at the start of the repression and evil attacks they conducted on Jews, minorities and other groups and it starts down a slippery slope with this sort of propaganda. By presupposing that they would rule against the government on the Article 50 ruling and go against ‘the will of the people’, it has whipped up a ferocious public frenzy. There have been attacks against some of the judges’ stance on the EU, and other personal aspects – the public has been duped into believing the judges are elite, and ‘out-of-touch’, despite the fact that they have their own lives, and are regularly in touch with public opinion and current affairs.