Is parliamentary sovereignty still vital?
John Jackson (London, Mishcon de Reya): The texts of Nick Herbert’s public speeches sometimes give the impression of having been drafted first by a well informed assistant, with a sound knowledge of our constitutional history, and then given a ‘going over’ by Herbert to provide a (Conservative Party) politically correct gloss. The result can read in an oddly disjointed – almost Palinist – way. This is a pity: it diminishes the value of serious attempts to discuss serious questions in a serious way. The public lecture commenting on a decade of the Human Rights Act, sponsored by the British Institute of Human Rights and delivered by Herbert yesterday at the site of the British Library’s Taking Liberties exhibition is a striking example of this. Despite the disjunctions, some good, and some bad, points emerged clearly from Herbert’s lecture. He was right to:- • Warn against the dangers of judicial activism; • Emphasise that human rights cannot have meaning, or exist, without popular conse
