Holding the Line Against Tyranny and Anarchy (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Moraes Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moraes (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton. This is one of those places—probably the only place—where you follow a speaker who was actually on your reading list for constitutional and administrative law. I do not know why I feel the need to say that I passed—no distinction, by the way, but I did pass. I know that the noble Lord was a very young professor, writing at a very early time—certainly when he appeared on my list.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, talked about how this report was put together. I must be speaker number eight or nine who is not on the committee, but I am willing to see how valuable the report is because it does something very difficult, which is to look at the thin and thick concepts of the rule of law. On the one hand is the profound idea of what the rule of law is at the highest level, the Bingham level, and on the other there is the day-to-day stuff that people have to deal with, and which my noble friend the Minister has to deal with in her department: delays, access to justice, access to legal aid where it is available—the nitty-gritty stuff that people have to deal with, and have had to deal with for a long time, but now it becomes more acute and difficult. The report brings together both these things, and noble Lords have spoken eloquently about it.

So much has been covered. I will alight on one experience of mine that might contextualise what is happening here in the UK, to give some perspective. In the 2010s I was chair of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee in the European Parliament. I know that sounds very boring. Unfortunately, under the treaties it gives you formal powers, along with the Commission and the Council, to investigate rule-of-law breaches, or alleged such breaches. Again, that sounds fairly mild, but there is nothing mild about it. It required months of going to countries such as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and, yes, even Malta, where there were genuine rule-of-law crises. Under the treaties there was an obligation to address and investigate those crises.

I want to give the House an idea of what the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, mentioned about saying that our system is broken and comparing it with what is happening in some countries. He did us a favour, by the way, by saying that up front. When you visit those countries, you find that there is a deep anxiety, even among those who support the Government, who may be moving to a more autocratic position. That is an important point because it speaks to the independence of judges from party politics, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, mentioned. Independence is not a perfect state for judges in Poland, Hungary or Slovakia. By the way, in Slovakia it was a centre left Government who were in crisis, so it is not all about party politics and the right or whatever.

In Poland I talked to judges, lawyers, community groups, businesspeople—anyone who was interested. Article 7 of the treaty was first invoked because of the crisis of the rule of law in Poland, which today is much repaired. They said, “Look, we feel very anxious about this”. Why? It was because the older generation had emerged from communist states where there was no independence. State judges, state police and state institutions are the very opposite of independence. So even those who wanted to move in a more autocratic direction were deeply anxious. For the younger generation, as both the report and the Government’s response have said, the rule of law is a live issue. It is about the economic health of the country, not just cultural and identity issues. They believe that, when their country is looked at in a certain way, it inhibits investment in, and a certain image of, their country. That is also important, and I saw it when I was in those countries.

We went to countries such as Slovakia, where there was a rule-of-law crisis because of widespread allegations of government corruption, corruption among judges, and so on. Investigative journalists were murdered when they were investigating it; it is real stuff. When you examine what is going on, you find that people often mention Lord Bingham and the Bingham Centre, and what they want and respect is a model that is about independence. They do not believe that would be perfect, and this speaks to the point about whether or not judges are party political, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, said. They want judges to be as independent as they can be—they are human beings, after all—but the issue is not to be overtly party political in their systems. That is the point, and that is all they were asking for.

In Poland, they did not want a set of judges who were pro the Government at that point to be replaced by a set of judges who were pro the opposition. No, they wanted judges who were as independent and as objective as possible. That would restore the rule of law, and it would affect the enforcement elements of the rule of law, the police and all those agencies that had been a real nightmare under communism—these were now post-communist states. Those were the lessons I learned, and they contextualise what is happening here.

To return to what the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, said about everything being broken, there are clearly issues that my noble friend has to deal with—delays, legal aid and all sorts of other issues. These days, the Ministry of Justice is not an easy department in this context. It has to fight for resources.

The rule of law is not some nebulous, abstract concept. I spoke to my son before this debate. I should not do this, because he has just finished his GCSEs and he really does not want me to talk about what I am doing in the House of Lords. I said to him, “You’re 16, you’ve just finished your GCSEs. What is the rule of law? What does it mean to you?” I regretted asking, because I thought he would just not answer. But he did: “Oh, it’s an idea”, and then he paused, as teenagers do, and said, “It’s rules”. Then he paused again and said, “In our country, we’re good at them”. I thought this was really interesting. In every country I visited where the rule of law mechanism was under attack, people cited the United Kingdom as having a robust set of institutions. There are some problems, but they can be corrected. This report, in my opinion, really contributes to that journey.