Conservative Party MP Jacob Rees-Mogg attends a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester, Britain October 2, 2017. REUTERS/Phil Noble – RC159C3DC020
Jacob Rees Mogg, Tory leader of the House of Commons, is an admirer of Victorian constitutional expert A V Dicey (he was indeed a relation of the Venn who the diagram was named after).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._V._Dicey
Dicey was known above all for popularising the term ‘Rule of Law’. A classical liberal he saw individual rights under the law as key and dismissed the idea of any collective presence. Hence he disapproved of trade union law which placed a group of people in a different legal position to an individual. Its likely Rees Mogg agrees though he doesnt bang on about this much in The Victorians.
The book however does devote a whole chapter to Dicey.
Rees Mogg writes in the book about Dicey’s classic text Introduction to the Study of Law of the Constitution:
it told a story about Victorian Britain.. The ‘Rule of Law’ for example meant here simply that we had regular law, rather than arbitrary or even discretionary law. .. Englishmen Dicey declared ‘are ruled by the law, and by the law alone’
Not perhaps the words of someone who thinks the decision of the Supreme Court on the sovereignty of Parliament is a ‘constitutional coup’.
A contradiction in Rees Mogg Thought it would seem
Leave a Reply