I intervened very briefly in a debate last night on a motion to approve a particular Order, the Judicial Appointments Order. My point related to the information contained in the Explanatory Memorandum but had a wider relevance. The Order was designed to encourage greater diversity in the membership of the judiciary through making Fellowship of the…
Not everyone gets a chance to visit the Palace of Westminster, a point that has been made by one or two visitors to this site. There are some virtual tours available on the Parliament website. Though second-best to an actual visit, some have the advantage of covering parts of the Palace not open to the…
In his farewell column in the Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins wrote: “This month Gordon Brown used the 2005 anti-terror law to seize the assets of Icelandic banks, an outrage that passed without protest from parliament and the courts.” Given that this was published on Sunday, the kindest thing that one can say about it is that…
Total Politics is a new monthly magazine; Iain Dale is the publisher. The November issue has an article, ‘Why we need the House of Lords’, by David Seymour, former political editor of the Mirror group. As he admits, he has moved from being a committed advocate of Lords reform to being a supporter of the present…
I was listening to Broadcasting House on Radio 4 on Sunday morning when they introduced a listener, an American novelist, who wanted to complain about the coverage in the UK of American politics. She took exception to references to ‘swing states’ on the grounds that Americans took the view that each vote counted as equal. …
