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The Supreme Court Debaclé
Mad props to Lord Lamont for this little gem:
My Lords, may I thank the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor for that Answer? Is he aware that I was just trying to save him from having two monuments to his folly? But he prefers to have two follies as a monument… Given the Government’s record on the Scottish Parliament building and the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor’s own involvement in the Millennium Dome, how can anyone have any confidence in the costs that he has put forward as estimates for the building of the new Supreme Court? Given that he said that the costs of the building will be defrayed by charges to the users of justice, can the noble and learned Lord explain why it should be right for the users of the court to carry the risk that the costs of the court will, judging by past experience, most likely be exceeded twice, five times or even 10 times?
Now, £6 million (the most conservative figure I found) or £2 million (the hugest figure I found) times by five? By ten? That’s a lorra, lorra hospitals. Not to mention the £10m that the new court will need to operate each year. The Judicial Committee as we have it now only costs £623,000. Why can we not simply reform that which we already have? Get rid of the horrible business of having the Lord Chancellor straddling the three branches and create an independent judicial appointments committee (and all the other juice) without the expense of moving?
This is yet another example of the government’s “packaging” strategy, a triumph of skin-deep, barrel scraping politics. Instead of taking each problem and finding a solution, we are being fobbed off with a package. We can’t pick and choose, we can only take the reform or leave it. It’s Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” all over again. We need reform of the House of Lords, but not in this way. We need one based on a rational and sensible approach to constitutional reform, the sort that Lord Falconer isn’t giving the country.
