As many will know, The Good Law Project won one of its many judicial review hearings against the government yesterday, showing in the process that Michael Gove acted illegally in placing a contract with a company called Public First.
As they say:
Michael Gove broke the law by giving a contract to a communications agency run by long time associates of him and Dominic Cummings, the High Court has decided.
The Court found that the decision to award the £560,000 contract to Public First was tainted by “apparent bias” and was unlawful. The Court found that Gove's:
“failure to consider any other research agency… would lead a fair minded and informed observer to conclude that there was a real possibility, or a real danger, that the decision maker was biased” (paragraph 168).
I was asked to comment on this case on LBC Radio last night and having read the decision, and knowing something about procurement, felt able to do so.
What surprised me was the opening stance, which was to be I presented with the claim that Dominic Cummings said there was nothing wrong here so what was all the fuss about? Jo Maugham of the Good Law Project faced the same line of questioning on Radio 4.
What is odd about this is that a court has decided Cummings and Gove were wrong here. Public law was broken. Surely the line of questioning should have been in that case that given that the Court had decided the facts what should happen now? Fur example, should Gove be allowed to continue in office? But instead the desire was to rerun the trial.
Why is it that journalists are so reluctant to hold ministers to account? And why is it that those who want to hold ministers accountable - which is part of their job spec - have to justify doing so?
No wonder we have a democratic crisis when journalists seem more interested in defending the wrong doer than they are in questioning what should happen to them.
Addition at 3.15pm 10 June 2021.
Iain Dale, who in terviewed me on LBC has made it clear he does not agree with the above comment, saying on Twitter:
Richard, I'm disappointed you misquote me in your article. I did not say or even imply that there was nothing to see here. I asked for your comments on Cummings's tweets. "Is there any justice in his argument?" was my exact question. I did not offer an opinion.
— Iain Dale âš'ï¸ (@IainDale) June 10, 2021
Iain obviously has his view. I disagree.I was surprised at the opening of this interview and that Cummings was even mentioned. I guessed we would open with ‘What happens to Gove now?' and we never got there, so I do have a somewhat different view of this from Iain. I was not looking for justice for Cummings. I wanted to discuss that a judge had decided the case and what the consequences were. In that context I think my comment quite fair. But I think it reasonable to note that Iain disagrees.
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As you said previously, these are dark days which are seemingly unending.
I had to laugh this morning hearing that Boris was comparing his get together with Biden in Cornwall as similar to that of Churchill and Roosevelt!!!
The lying is just incredible – Johnson’s Government is destroying our society – not building it. Again agnotological ‘murketing’ sends out the ‘all clear, it’s all in hand’ signal to society and many go back to their mobile phones thinking everything is going to be OK.
Well, it’s not.
It’s a long way down…………………….
This is because we now have a new constitutional principle that trumps law: it is termed “cutting through”. If the legal breach does not ‘cut through’ with the electorate, it simply does not count: what “cuts through” is defined and established by the Media, in its ‘Agenda setting’ role.
We live in an electoral dictatorship in Britain; this means that the limits of power and entitlement of Government are solely determined by the exercise of a majority in Parliament, in conjunction with a managed Agenda. Nothing else matters.
Why are lickspittle ‘journalists’ in the MSM being odious presstitutes spouting lies and propaganda for their billionaire and DS masters with impunity for lodsamoney???
Is it still a mystery to the many?
I bet they won’t be reporting fairly on the mass protests against their, hopefully one of the last councils of the declining, fetid, Anglo Imperial rump, despair, as it plans for a world war to remain in control of the World, it’s People’s and it’s Resources – in a continuation of its Racist Entitlement and Exceptionalism.
They are officially coming after the independent journalist bloggers now…
Build the barricades – not to keep them out but to ‘kettle’ THEM in – and eliminate, their rabid voracious diseased plans – before they do it to the rest of humanity and life on Earth, is the correct path.
Starting with the daily nonstop lying bastard wormtongue minions of the MSM.
And apparently it cost the Westminster Government more in legal costs, allegedly £600,000, to defend the case.
Then they wasted their money
The belief is that they did so deliberately, hoping to land the costs on The Good Law Project
Imagine the media reaction if Nicola Sturgeon was found to have broken the law. The MSM would be hysterical.
Obviously flouting the law by the rich and privileged is seen as bona fide as the highest in the land seem intent upon doing. The £500,000 contract is peanuts compared to the billions spent on cronyism contracts awarded for supplying PPE. Establishment journalists only follow whom they consider their betters in this regard. Cummings and Gove shrugging this off is only to be expected.
Sure, the law may have been broken. But nobody cares because:
The amount is trivial and it is a technical breach of the rules, not out and out corruption. More money was spent (wasted) on fighting this case than the contract itself.
The Good Law Project isn’t really about good law, it’s just the legal wing of the Labour party. It only exists to attack the current government and is nakedly political. It is run by extremely rich metropolitan elites, one of which is a fox bashing barrister who made his money helping people avoid tax.
If it was about good law, where are it’s cases against the SNP (which is currently mired in several real corruption scandals) or the Labour party in Liverpool (where the numbers are a much more significant £100m).
Where indeed.
People don’t care for all these reasons and many more. There are far bigger things to worry about than wasting taxpayers money trying to score political points by finding some small mistake and trying to blow it up as a huge scandal.
Paradoxically, every time the Good Law Project wins one of their cases and their cheerleaders sing their praises, yet more regular people turn away from the Labour party and go blue. Good job Jolyon.
It takes a massive indifference to democracy, corruption and the rule of law to make a comment like that
A liking for totalitarianism, in fact
What has this political lawfare, which amounts to nothing more than trying to find some minor point where the government slipped up, got to do with democracy?
Or even corruption? The judgement makes no mention of corruption. Only that the full process wasn’t followed as it should have been. The same judgement amounts to no more than a political gotcha as the judge is not recommending any punishment given the infraction was so minor.
But if you are so concerned about democracy, corruption and totalitarianism, why are you or the Good Law Project busy with the SNP, whic is currently mired in several corruption scandals and is busy taking over the institutions of state and using them for party political ends – as evidenced all too well in the Alex Salmond scandal.
Nothing? Of course not. For people like you and Jolyon it’s not really about corruption or democracy, it’s about getting the party you don’t like out of power and getting yourselves and the Labour party in.
If you don’t think people can’t see through that – you are dumber than I thought.
I am not the GLP
And internal SNP fights are not its business or mine
What I do know is public law was broken as a result of the appearance of bias – and that is what corruption looks like
If you can’t see that then you are permitting that corruption, and you are not welcome here
Stuart
You are out of order.
The reason why Gove & Co broke the rules on procurement was because although the UK was the second best prepared democracy in the world to deal with a pandemic as of 2003, as soon as the Tories came in in 2010, they began an austerity regime that also affected the pandemic preparedness such as the storage and supply of PPE, stocks of ventilators and the viability of the NHS to deal with a pandemic.
So in other words – just so your little mind can understand OK? – the Tories own austerity polices undermined the country’s capability to counter act the pandemic effectively – which of course leads to procurement rules being broken in the name of an emergency – a self created emergency, created by the Tories out of short-sightedness and a manic desire to cut support for services. Actions that have led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. So, do you get it yet?
What sort of Government cuts back on things like that, only to dig itself a deeper hole later on and break its own rules in a self-induced panic? And society is relying on them to react and protect us?
It’s not the GLP that’s point scoring here – it’s YOU.
It’s not my blog and I tell myself constantly to try to be kind to poorly informed people like you who peddle tripe like this.
On this occasion however all I can say is please go and be moron somewhere else. Failing that, READ – because the facts about how badly this Government has seriously fucked up are legion – LEGION – do you here me ‘Stuart’?
Christ…………………………!!!!!
I only intervene here to point out a very clear trolling manoeuvre – the ‘whatabouttery ‘ .
The post does it subtly
“ if you are so concerned … why are you…”
There are daily more dropping stuff like that here.
It’s a good sign that the site is making in-roads and THEY are worried.
I personally ignore them but was interested by this iteration.
They clearly are worried….
Ye gods! Do you really believe what you wrote? I despair.
“Sure, the law may have been broken. But nobody cares because: The amount is trivial ”
Which is a point of view.
Let’sa take the example of: I defraud the DWP of … £10,000 – which by your definition is a trival amount. I guarantee you people would care. I would be labelled a “benefit cheat” and the DWP would seek to put me in prison/recover the money & doubtless some sections of the MSM would pass their own judgement.
Thus we have one law for those in government & another for those not in government. This is not a good situation.
Well said
That ministers believe themselves to be above the law is something we are getting used to, but as you say, it is very concerning that mainstream journalists are not challenging this.
Are we to dispense with the courts and rely on trial by media(barons)? That will be a shortcut to perdition……..
Presumably the High Court will pass sentence ……?
At least the EU is! https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/10/boris-johnson-must-respect-rule-of-law-implement-brexit-deal-eu
As you say Richard – very chilling about the line of questioning by ‘independent’? journalists.
Yesterday a BBC senior correspondent – commenting on the govt already breaking the international treaty- the NI protocol:
‘having signed it…. they decided to kick the details down the road’ – not that they ‘broke the treaty’ .
Which is what they did
Absolutely. The behaviour of these journalists is hard to understand. Do they seriously want to live in a society without the rule of law? Self-lobotomization.
Anyone wondering about the credibility or otherwise of journalists might like to consider the case of a certain Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (via Wikipedia).
Through family connections, in late 1987 he began work as a graduate trainee at The Times. Scandal erupted when Johnson wrote an article on the archaeological discovery of King Edward II’s palace for the newspaper, having invented a quote for the article which he falsely attributed to the historian Colin Lucas, his godfather. After the editor Charles Wilson learnt of the matter, Johnson was dismissed.
Johnson then secured employment on the leader-writing desk of The Daily Telegraph, having met its editor, Max Hastings, during his Oxford University Union presidency.
Family connections, the old school tie…. presumably this cant apply to every journalist in the MSM, but you have to wonder how many it does apply to, and how it affects their perceptions of what their readers should or shouldn’t be told.
In my local newspaper, online edition, soap opera plotlines are often given higher visibility than actual real-life news. I think that says it all really.
……and even Max Hastings comments that “he (Boris Johnson) is not fit to be PM.
I don’t care if anyone thinks the GLP is the legal arm of the Labour Party, the Mormon Church or the Intergalactic Alliance. The fact that it exists and is highlighting wrongdoing in the Government is a dreadful indictment on the current direction of UK politics. I used to believe that most people wanted honest government and would demand that politicians and their aides would resign if found in breach of a certain standard.
Now we have a Government that believes the letter of the law applies only to Plebs, whereas ministers must be allowed an infinitely flexible (non-purist) interpretation in order to do their jobs.
It should never be necessary for ordinary people to crowd-fund legal action to prove that the Government is working against their best interests. When that becomes necessary, democracy and the law have both failed.
Agreed
I found the interview on global player – just to see what was actually said between the two of you, but I don’t want to listen to the whole thing. Any idea what sort of time it was around? I assume it was the 9th June 2021.
https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/42Kr9w/
I don’t recall the time