What should we make of the Times story yesterday, which appeared under the headline ‘Boris Johnson Plans To Let Ministers Throw Out Legal Rulings’? The impression given is that ministers will somehow be handed powers by the Prime Minister simply to ignore court rulings that they do not like. That would lead to an extraordinary constitutional crisis, involving either the arrest and imprisonment of ministers for contempt of court, or the arrest and imprisonment of judges with the government exercising Erdogan-style despotism.
Nobody can seriously believe that this is what is intended, and the rest of the Times story makes clear that it is not. Instead, the idea which is said to find favour with the Justice Secretary and the Attorney General, is ‘an annual “Interpretation Bill” to strike out findings from judicial reviews with which the government does not agree’.
That, of course, is a very different thing from giving ministers a power to ignore awkward court rulings.
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