The so-called Supreme Court’s ruling about unfair bank charges has, quite rightly, provoked storms of protest from consumers and consumer groups. They see that, once again, the courts have sided against consumers and in favour of wealthy banks and corporations. The decision is, above all, a timely reminder of the amount of power that has shifted out of the hands of elected politicians, who we can remove, and into the hands of the unelected judiciary since 1997.
All too often (and this has particularly been the case since the incorporation of the HRA) this Government has been happy to effectively give policy making powers to the judiciary. This is both an abdication of democratic duty and the concentration of power in the hands of a small, unrepresentative and undemocratic elite. The judiciary come from a shockingly small sample of society – some 85% of senior judges were educated in public schools. We should be asking ourselves whether such an unrepresentative, unaccountable body should be playing such a political role. The judiciary is completely unaccountable and, at times, seems to feel that it can treat elected politicians with contempt.
It should surely concern us all that the judiciary, in the past twelve years, has moved away from being a body that interprets the law and towards being a body that makes law. It has used its powers of ‘interpretation’ to turn the meaning of certain laws on their head and, to all intents and purposes, make rather than interpret law.
We should not be concentrating so much near legislative power in a body that is unrepresentative, unaccountable and unelected. We may not like what our politicians do. But we can remove them. And we can hold them to account. This is why we need to scrap the Human Rights Act. This is why we need to be watchful of a politicised and over powerful judiciary.
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You really do have a big chip on your shoulder about public schools. I would rather that judges were intelligent and well-educated than selected because they fall within some arbitrary quota. They haven’t done a bad job over the last ten years in standing up to an authoritarian Government and the elective dictatorship of the House of Commons, especially as the official opposition has been useless. However, I have some sympathy for your criticisms of our activist judiciary. Their disastrous and sexist interventions in the area of family law are a good example. But if you are really worried about judicial activism, your focus should be on the European Courts of Justice and Human Rights who barely bother to conceal that they are unelected legislators. In comparison with them, our judges are paragons of self-restraint.