Judges and the Law
The view of this writer is that the judges have progressively extended the law way beyond what the statutes have provided and this trend must be reversed, by legislation if necessary.
The main areas of judicial activism are immigration and human rights which are often cited in deportation cases.
It is perfectly clear that the judges interpret human rights in a way that removes any special rights pertaining to citizenship. In the judges’ eyes, British citizens living in Britain have no rights which differentiate them from foreigners living here, except the increasingly depreciated right to vote in parliamentary elections. There is nothing in this writer’s view that has done more to undermine people’s sense of pride in being British and their loyalty to the very idea of a British nation than the judges’ behaviour in the last 10 years or so.
Not only have they used the Human rights Act to do this, their unconstitutional interpretation of the 1972 European Communities Act section 2 has been repeatedly used to frustrate the will of parliament and people and expresssed most notably in the question of fishing quotas. The Merchant Shipping Act 1989 which was passsed in both Houses of Parliament nem con provided among other things that only British owned vessels could fish Britain’ s quota in Britain’s waters.
The judges maintained, without a shred of democratic justification, that this contravened the 1972 ECA and therefore was illegal, thereby unilaterally tearing up the most fundamental principle of British consitutional practice, enshrined through the centuries that no parliament can bind its successor.
The judges may have been right that the 1989 Merchant Shipping Act put the government at odds with the 1972 ECA, but their job is and was to interpret the Law as passed by Parliament and not to amend it themselves. It is for the government of the day, reponsible to the British people, to resolve any problems arising from prior treaty obligations, and if it so chooses to bring forward legislation for consideration by Parliament.
