Dear oh dear. Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t caught a break since his party took power last July – and this week is no exception. Now the UK’s most senior judge has taken a pop at the Labour leader over ‘unacceptable’ criticism of an immigration judge who allowed Gazan refugees entry to the UK. Even the lawyers are turning on the former DPP!
The remarks of the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Sue Carr followed a rather heated exchange at PMQs last Wednesday. Both Starmer and the Tory party leader Kemi Badenoch blasted the judge’s move to allow a Palestinian family to come to Britain via the Ukrainian refugee programme. Sir Keir fumed that the decision wasn’t just wrong, but added that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was hard at work closing the ‘loophole’ in the scheme.
Carr – who has set up a new security Taskforce to review judicial security – revealed she had written to both the Prime Minister and the Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood to express how she had been ‘deeply troubled’ by the comments in the Chamber. Speaking to the Telegraph about the episode, the Lady Chief Justice insisted:
I think it started with a question from the opposition suggesting that the decision in a certain case was wrong, and obviously the Prime Minister’s response to that. Both the question and the answer were unacceptable. It is for the government visibly to respect and protect the independence of judiciary where parties, including the government, disagree with their findings. They should do so through the appellate process. And of course MPs, just like the governing body also have a duty to respect the rule of law.
Not that Carr has other legal bigwigs on side. In fact, Oxford law professor Richard Ekins KC has hit out at the Lady Chief Justice’s ‘very ill-advised intervention’. He went on: ‘Neither judicial independence nor the rule of law entitle judges to be free from criticism, and the Lady Chief Justice is wrong to attempt to suppress criticism.’ Oo er. All the while, the PM continues to feel the heat from voters who are increasingly concerned about Britain’s borders. He just can’t win, eh?
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