THIS MONTH SEES THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE introduction of what would become the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which swept away the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and replaced it with the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Like many New Labour inventions, the Supreme Court may now seem to many with hazy memories of pre-1997 Britain and over-familiarity with its famous American counterpart to be a historic part of the British constitutional landscape.
Yet its establishment ended centuries of tradition, whereby Parliament, represented by the House of Lords, sat as the kingdom’s highest court. The change would have profound consequences on the British constitutional settlement, centred on the supremacy of Parliament. And it was done with almost no forethought, coming about through a typically high-handed piece of Blairism.
Since the nineteenth century, the bulk of the Lords’ judicial work had been done by senior lawyers ennobled for life, familiarly known as the”law lords”, who constituted the Appellate Committee. At their head was the Lord High Chancellor, who also served as a cabinet minister and the speaker of the House of Lords. It was a unique arrangement, and foreign observers sometimes disapproved of it. It was said, for instance, that it gave the wrong idea to Eastern European judges, to whom Brussels was trying to teach the virtues of judicial independence. But the idiosyncratic system worked perfectly well:
