Supreme whimper?

Constitutional reform was very much a first term project for New Labour, testament to the fact that Tony Blair had inherited much of the reform package from his predecessors as Labour leader. But soon we shall witness one of the changes to the furniture of government that will bring the UK into line with many other liberal democracies, when the highest court in the land is finally divorced from the legislature.

As Martin Kettle writes in an excellent column in the Guardian:

“Nearly a century and a half after Bagehot wrote that the highest court in the country “ought to be a great conspicuous tribunal” and “ought not to be hidden beneath the robes of a legislative assembly”, his urgings will at last have been carried out. Britain’s judges will no longer sit in parliament. Not before time, the court will look like what it actually is.”

Read more on the nuts and bolts of the building here. One would think that a school visit to Westminster would include the new Supreme Court?