Baroness Chakrabarti condemned Rishi Sunak’s “sabre-rattling about ‘the unelected House of Lords will have to do the right thing’”.
“If Parliament is to address the Supreme Court’s concerns, my noble and learned friend and his committee must be listened to,” she stated.
“Because everything he has said, with all due respect to our Commonwealth friend and partner in Rwanda, is triggered not on what we say, what we deem with a flick of a pen, but the legitimate and totally noble aspiration… Perhaps we’ll all become safer, but it is that greater safety in the future that the Supreme Court – not a foreign court, let alone an international court – that our very own Supreme Court called for.”
She added: “Before all of the lectures about unelected second homes et cetera, I do assume on issues of the rule of legislation, your lordships have an element to play. And particularly in a rustic with an unwritten structure, a Human Rights Act, a contemporary Bill of Rights which isn’t entrenched – and even when the very best courtroom within the land, the Supreme Court, doesn’t have the strike down powers that different democracies reserve for his or her highest courts.
“I do imagine that noble Lords are entitled to be just a little extra muscular than normal in relation to issues corresponding to this that had been, my Lords, not in anybody’s manifesto, that threat being opposite to the home rule of legislation, together with by ousting the jurisdiction of the legislation or certainly altering actuality because it has been discovered by the Supreme Court on Nov 15. Slightly muscular in relation to issues that threat breaching worldwide legislation.”
