The shadow Home Secretary David Davis has astonishingly announced he will resign his seat in East Yorkshire and force a by-election on the single issue of liberty: he sees it as a personal campaign to stop the government’s erosion of […]

Some people have suggested that when the House of Lords becomes our Supreme Court in just over a year, it should abandon the practice of judges giving individual judgments, sometimes disagreeing with each other, which means lawyers have to work […]

I’m enjoying watching Lord Goldsmith, who’s Andrew Neil’s guest on the Daily Politics today. He’s a serious chap more suited to Newsnight or Today than to joshing about the way Andrew Neil does – but he’s doing his best.

But only by a scrape. Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith won their commons vote on the reserve power to extend terror suspects’ detention up to 42 days. They got the votes of a few vital Labour backbenchers and of the […]

I’ve had the debate on in the background this afternoon (while marking a never-ending pile of exam papers on free movement of goods and persons) – and it’s not been a bad one. Bill Cash has obsessively been intervening to […]

The Lords have given quite an interesting judgment today on the standard of proof in care proceedings under the Children Act 1989, which I think in principle applies across the board in civil proceedings. They’ve cut through the confusion […]

Jacqui Smith is on her feet as I write, opening the third reading debate on the Counter-Terrorism Bill: at about 7 o’clock tonight MPs will finally vote on the government’s proposed reserve power to extend detention of terror suspects without […]

It was probably predictable that at some point the public and political debate about this bill, and the proposed extension of pre-charge detention of terror suspects to a potential maximum of 42 days, would be diverted away from the merits […]

It’s not been a big news story, but if you think about it, it could be one of the biggest political stories of 2008: on Thursday, Irish voters choose in a referendum whether or not to approve the Treaty of […]

The trial of Al Qaeda suspects in the US big news at the moment of course – with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and others having appeared before a military tribunal on Friday. I’m interested, though, in this Federal Court […]