For all the praise heaped on Peter Hain for revealing the details of a legal case subject to injunction, there’s been depressingly little acknowledgement of what this really means: namely that a senior politician has fundamentally undermined the rule of law.
Hain – who, unlike many of his peers, has never been a lawyer– has taken it upon himself to usurp the function of the courts. And not just any court – the Supreme Court, where the case was probably heading.
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In fact, the judge he overruled is Sir Terence Etherton, the head of the Court of Appeal and the second highest judge in the country (after the Lord Chief Justice). Famously, he’s one of the judges that the Daily Mail called an ‘enemy of the people’ when the Supreme Court ruled that the Government needed the consent of parliament to trigger Article 50.
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