Parliament should have right to monitor judges

While egregious class-based sentencing decisions are indeed a real problem, so is the increasing intervention by the judges in areas of government usually thought to be the province of an executive and Parliament accountable to the people.

The way to remedy both problems is to bring about the democratisation of the judiciary, not their bureaucratisation, as envisaged in Marx's The civil war in France.

There is already a Judicial Appointments Commission in England, but it is as unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable as those it puts forward for appointment.

In 1980 senior judge Leslie Scarman warned that the time would come when "confidence in the judicial system will be replaced by fear of it becoming uncertain or arbitrary in its application" because "people and Parliament come to think that the judicial power is to be confined by nothing other than the judge's sense of what is right."

John Green demonstrates that we have reached this time.

The first steps on the road to accountability will be to make all senior judicial appointments subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval, and to put lower-level appointments into the hands of local communities.

David Radlett

Gillingham