The "scandal" of the dropping of the investigation into BAe and Saudi Arabia (is it a Labour Government's defence of the skilled, high-wage, high-status jobs of the British working class that is "scandalous"?) is, in any case, as nothing compared to John Major's appointment of Jonathan Aitken (whom I freely accept is a changed man these days) as Minister of Defence Procurement on the direct orders of the Saudi Royal Family. Remember that? Some of us do.
Kirsty Walk on Newsnight practically had kittens over "the separation of powers". Had she heard that term on The West Wing, or Sex and the City, or Pimp My Ride, or something? When will she be demanding that all Ministers resign their seats in either House; that the Law Lords renounce either their peerages or their seats on the bench; and so forth. "The separation of powers"? I ask you! What next? "The separation of Church and State"?
But then, waiting for Newsnight to come on in one of these non-Question Time seasons when everything interesting seems to happen, I caught the end of something called Coupling, the characters in which spoke with middle-class London accents even though the thing itself seemed to be set in New York, or at least in the city of Friends and Will & Grace. They even used American, rather than British, phraseology. Such, I suspect, is the world that the BBC newsroom inhabits, utterly unrecognisable to the rest of us. "Separation", indeed.
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Yes, yes, I know all of this. But as you yourself say "it is not clear that in a modern constitution these roles remain separate" (Law Lords, the Home Secretary's role in determining sentences, the fact that all members of the Executive are required to be members of the Legislature, &c). Indeed, they never were, nor ever can be.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, Lord Diplock seems to be engaging in a spot of wishful thinking, as such people often do, because they wish to see an American-style krytocracy in this country. (The wretched Human Rights Act is a big step in that direction.)
Mercifully, we still have instead the supreme legislative, executive and judical authority of the Crown (i.e., of the nation embodied, regardless of party or anything else), exercised by Ministers drawn from and accountable to Parliament, within which the House of Commons has come to be elected by universal adult suffrange and (since 1911) to be supreme.
The Crown is the ultimate contractiction of what you yourself admit is the Franco-American, and in nos sense indigenously British, theory of the separation of powers; and it is thus the ultimate guarantee that the United Kingdom (and each of the 15 countries with which we share the Crown) will remain a democracy, unlike either absolutist and coup-plagued France or krytocratic America, among many other places.