At first sight, it may seem odd to make Michael Gove the new Justice Secretary. But he has had experience – all too much of it. His job will be to clean up the mess of the Human Rights Act. In the Department for Education he saw for himself how the rule of law was degenerating into something different: the rule by lawyers.
Any time civil servants don’t want to carry out a reform, they invoke the Human Rights Act – or the Equalities Act, a booby trap planted in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s government. The aim was to make it a lot easier to sue conservatives. Gove came up against the effect of this the whole time. Lawyers seemed to rule the roost. Sorry, Secretary of State, but it’s against European law for teachers to tell kids to turn out their pockets. Or to get rid of bad teachers. And go slow with school reform – you’ll end up slapped with a Judicial Review if you get dot or comma wrong.
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