The Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Baroness Hale of Richmond, has come under fire from a number of Brexiteers, including Iain Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Raab, over a speech that she gave to Malaysian law students last week. They have suggested that the speech indicated bias against the Government’s case.
Most of the now controversial speech amounted to a canter through the short history of the UK Supreme Court. It was doubtless of considerable interest to the students, particularly as it was delivered in Lady Hale’s clear and attractive style. She devoted just one relatively short section of the speech to a discussion of the Article 50 case. She did so partly because, as she put it, it would have been “discourteous” to her hosts not to explain what the case was all about. She summarised both sides’ arguments pithily. Had she stopped at that, she probably would have escaped any adverse comment. Continue reading “Lady Hale is a great judge but she made a mistake in Malaysia”