New Brexiteer Attorney General Wants to ‘Take Back Control’ of Power from Courts

LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 13: Newly appointed Attorney General Suella Braverman leaves 10
Leon Neal/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

The newly-appointed Attorney General Suella Braverman has said that the British people and its elected representatives must be able to “take back control” of power from the British judiciary.

In a massive shakeup of the Cabinet and other senior positions, Boris Johnson appointed the Brexiteer to the role of the government’s most senior legal advisor.

Politics Home reports that both the prime minister and his special advisor Dominic Cummings were infuriated by the courts’ latest interference in government decisions, this time in the extradition of violent convicted criminals to Jamaica last week, shedding light in part on the rationale for appointing the MP.

Writing in Conservative Home two weeks ago, Mrs Braverman had condemned the increased power that judges were exerting over elected politicians and the overuse of judicial review challenges, particularly in matters relating to fulfilling the voters’ mandate to leave the EU.

“Brexit has served as a flashpoint of the shrinkage of politics and the ascent of law,” the MP for Fareham had written on January 27th.

“Restoring sovereignty to parliament after Brexit is one of the greatest prizes that awaits us. But not just from the EU. As we start this new chapter of our democratic story, our parliament must retrieve power ceded to another place – the courts,” she wrote.

“Traditionally, Parliament made the law and judges applied it. But today, our courts exercise a form of political power… The political has been captured by the legal. Decisions of an executive, legislative and democratic nature have been assumed by our courts. Prorogation and the triggering of Article 50 were merely the latest examples of a chronic and steady encroachment by the judges,” the barrister said.

The barrister’s biography reveals a story of aspiration and success in attaining the ‘British Dream’; the child of working-class immigrant parents — one an NHS nurse, both serving the local community in various capacities — she attended a state school before winning a scholarship to help pay towards fees at a private school.

Braverman, née Fernandes, then read law at Queens’ College, Cambridge, before completing a Masters in European and French Law (LLM) at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. A barrister for ten years before becoming an MP in 2015, she had also qualified as an attorney in the state of New York.

Mrs Braverman, who campaigned to leave the EU in 2016 and was chairman of the European Research Group in 2017, was one of the earliest resignations from Theresa May’s government in July 2018 over the then-prime minister’s soft-Brexit plans.

Braverman also provoked the ire of leftists by declaring at an event last year that “as Conservatives, we are engaged in a battle against cultural Marxism” — with her opponents accusing her of using an antisemitic trope. However, the Board of Deputies of British Jews later met with the MP and said she was “clearly a good friend of the Jewish community”.

The MP had doubled down in the remarks at the event, saying afterwards: “Yes, I do believe we are in a battle against a cultural Marxism, as I said. We have culture evolving from the far left which has allowed the snuffing out of freedom of speech, freedom of thought. No one can get offended any more, we are living in a culture where we are putting everyone in cotton wool, a risk-averse mentality is now taking over.”

Breitbart News’s James Delingpole referred to Geoffrey Cox QC’s replacement as a “much sounder bet”. He wrote on Thursday:

Braverman appointment seems to confirm that one of the battles Cummings most wants to win is with the legal and administrative Deep State.

In the run up to the general election, Britain had effectively fallen victim to a constitutional coup, conducted — inter alia — by the rogue activist judges of the judiciary, led by Supreme Court head Baroness Hale.

Britain’s judiciary, irredeemably left wing, stands in the way of Cummings’s plans to rebalance the justice system away from supporting loony liberal-left causes and towards acting in the interests of the British people — e.g. worrying less about the human rights of terrorists and other criminals; worrying more about keeping British people safe.

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