🏛️ We are looking over the precipice

The challenge of governing is in trade-offs

The problem about single-issue pressure groups is that they evade the principal challenge of governments, which is the need to think of many different things at the same time and to conduct a trade-off between inconsistent factors. The reality is that the best solution to any problem is not necessarily the best one, if that sounds ironic... Sometimes, the solution to one problem comes at a heavy price in terms of another. And the business of weighing advantages and disadvantages against each other across the whole range of government policy is a very difficult one. Single-issue pressure groups absolve themselves from that problem. Governments don’t have that luxury.

Citizens’ assemblies lack legitimacy

I don't have much time for citizens' assemblies. We have a perfectly good citizens' assembly in the form of a House of Commons. The only difference between citizens' assemblies and people in that House of Commons is that the participants in the citizens' assemblies are a great deal less well-informed than MPs, and do not have the legitimacy that comes of being elected. 

Government and legislation are highly professional jobs, calling for a good deal of experience and expertise. And however dissatisfied you may be with your elected representatives, the answer–if you don't like them–is to change them and not to abandon the system altogether and replace it with something which has no legitimacy at all.

The courts should not replace democratic decision-making

It is not a proper function of litigation to act as an advertising soundboard for a pressure group’s policies. Single-issue pressure groups often bring legal challenges to government decisions which have been improperly made. And I don't have any problem about that. The reasons why they're improperly made tend to be technical. The public may applaud the defeat of the government in the courts on significant policy issues, but they tend to applaud on the grounds that they don't like the policy. Whereas the courts will not have struck them down on that basis, but on the basis that the government set about putting it into effect in a legally inappropriate way. Those are two completely different approaches.

The court's function is not to replace the judgement of elected MPs, or of ministers who are constitutionally responsible to Parliament. If the public does not like a policy, the correct route to resolve that is through politics, not the courts. There were a number of cases in the last 30 or 40 years which crossed a line into territory that does not belong to judges. But recently, the position has greatly improved. The Supreme Court has made a number of decisions which seemed to me to properly reflect the distribution of powers in our constitution. I think that we are, therefore, in a much better position than we were, so that the threat to democracy comes from completely different directions now.