Author Archives: Sara Ogilvie

The Independent View: Why Liberal Democrat MPs should reject Government’s power-grabbing judicial review proposals

Undemocratic, unnecessary and unfair, over the past eleven months the Government’s crude attempts to curtail judicial review have been the subject of intense parliamentary debate. And yet today, as MPs are once again called to vote on the proposals, the government is attempting to pull off an unusual parliamentary feat: disregarding fierce cross-party criticism to make its proposals worse, rather than better.

Judicial review is the legal mechanism by which individuals and organisations can ask a court to check whether a public authority has acted lawfully. The powers of the court in a judicial review are limited, but in a modern democracy, where great power is concentrated in the hands of the executive, it is one of the great and vital levelers. 

Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | 16 Comments
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  • Tim Rogers
    Thank you for this insightful article. Everything seems to be moving at an ever increasing speed and therefore struggling to catch one's breath. Every nation an...
  • Adam
    "Actually, it was rearmament in the 1930s that pulled countries out of the Great Depression and proved that government deficit spending would boost the economy....
  • Nigel Jones
    @Jana, you hit the nail on the head about not opposing someone just because they self-describe as Christian (even perhaps theologically conservative); the key i...
  • Jana
    @ Tim Rogers Actually, it was rearmament in the 1930s that pulled countries out of the Great Depression and proved that government deficit spending would boos...
  • David Warren
    What @MickTaylor said!...