LADY HALE, PRESIDENT OF THE SUPREME COURT AND FEMINIST ACTIVIST

LADY HALE, PRESIDENT OF THE SUPREME COURT AND FEMINIST ACTIVIST

Many lawyers and constitutional commentators have pointed out that Lady Hale, the President of the Supreme Court, who delivered the Judgment in the proroguing of Parliament case, and her colleagues in the Supreme Court, invented a completely new basis on which “Proceedings in Parliament” would be dealt with by the courts.  They completely ignored the legally and constitutionally correctly traditional Judgment of the High Court.  

I thought however that it was worth highlighting Lady Hale’s comments that were reported approvingly in the Sunday Times on September 29^th under the headline of “Take the right partner to be supreme at law” by Nicholas Hellen.  He writes about Lady Hale and her political views from a speech that she made at the launch of “Cambridge Women in Law” in which he says that she “spent an hour dispensing her thoughts on how women can succeed in the male dominated world of the judiciary”. 

The article reports Lady Hale as saying:- “When I came to Cambridge, I knew it was a privilege.  I bet every woman in this room knew it was a privilege to be here.  But I was surrounded by men who thought they were entitled to be here.  And that is one of the things that we still have to go on fighting against.  The male sense of entitlement.”

She spoke of loosening the grip of the “quadrangle-to-quadrangle-to-quadrangle boys”.  A reference to a man who goes from a public school to Oxbridge and then to the Inns of Court “we haven’t got the history of people of our sex doing the job for generation after generation”, she told the audience. 

Hale said:- “Feminism is believing in equality, equality for women and the validity of women’s experiences.  That is how I define feminism. 

Men can be feminists too and there are lots of them and there are loads of women who aren’t.  Those are probably the people that we most have to contend with rather than men because they are in many ways the real problem rather than men.”

She also spoke of sometimes lacking in confidence, and talked of how Gina Miller, the businesswoman and campaigner who brought the case to the Supreme Court, dressed to help give her the confidence to fend off “people’s bigoted assumptions”. 

Hale suggested that this was a metaphor, “throwing light on this problem that women generally lack confidence”. 

The article finishes by saying that Lady Hale has asked Mary Arden, who has joined the Supreme Court:- “I have asked her please, please when I retire, would she keep up the good work”. 

Whatever you think of Lady Hale’s views, the one certainty it seems to me is that she is demonstrating yet again where on the spectrum her political values come from.  So she is vividly demonstrating that the Blairite creation of the Supreme Court has worked well from its creator’s point of view in entrenching Blairism into the Constitution.  It also vividly demonstrates the general effectiveness of the Left’s “Long March through the Institutions”. 

What do you think?