Blunkett: I won't give in

My announcement of new sentences for murders - so that life means life - provoked the latest wave of media coverage on my so-called "war on the judges". I can see why. It is easy to caricature any disagreement as the hot-tempered working-class Sheffield boy taking on an icy-cool retired judge pontificating from his Surrey drawing room.

Yet I am not "at war" with judges, barristers or the rest of the legal profession. I believe strongly in a politically independent judiciary, the rule of law and due process. But I also believe in Parliament and a healthy democracy where people vote in elections because their vote can make a difference to the world they live in, through the politicians they elect. Surely it is possible to have a strong and lively debate about how Parliament and the judiciary fit together without it always being portrayed as a brawling slanging match?

This is not some dry debate in Westminster. Confidence in our criminal justice system is at an all-time low. Public respect for judges, politicians and lawyers alike is equally low. Up and down the country, the experience of victims and witnesses is too often a poor one where they are treated as bit-players in a system which sees process as being more important than justice, where technicalities are more important than the truth.

When politicians make these points we are not seeking to wind up the legal profession for the sake of it. We are doing our job and speaking up for the public we serve. There are no newspaper editors, columnists or opinion formers living in my inner-city Sheffield constituency. If I don't speak about the experiences of my constituents and millions like them, they have no voice at all in the public arena.

I want to improve this situation and to get reform in the criminal justice system that brings the legal profession with us. To do this, we need a long hard look at the constitutional relationship between Parliament and the judges and be clear how it has changed.

This relationship has changed beyond all recognition over the past 30 years, thanks to the use of judicial review - the process by which an individual can ask the court to overturn effect or implementation of a law on their individual circumstance. Judges now routinely use judicial review to rewrite the effects of a law that Parliament has passed.

This isn't just my view, it is endorsed by some of the most distinguished legal minds in the country. Professor Sir William Wade - the author of Administrative Law - has written: "The judges have established judicial review as an almost boundless jurisdiction over almost every kind of governmental activity." Lord Beloff QC has said that the activities of the judiciary have "infringed the sovereignty of Parliament".

Lord Beloff also points out that in the 1950s, judicial review was confined to fewer than 100 cases a year relating to maladministration of government.

Now, there are thousands of cases every year in every field of commerce; construction, aviation, and IT, all inviting lawyers and judges to find ever more ingenious ways of getting what they want from the law Parliament has passed.

Added to this have been a rash of high-profile cases brought under the 1998 Human Rights Act which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law.

I believe most of these cases would have ended up in Strasbourg anyway if we had not taken the step of building the ECHR into our legal system. But it has undoubtedly encouraged some in the legal profession to see a further way of rendering ineffective laws they don't like.

In my area, the impact of judicial review has been most visible in several high profile asylum cases on fast-track claims at the Oakington centre and cash payments for late claimants.

In both cases, the Home Office eventually won the legal arguments but not before a major tussle which resulted in plenty of premature headlines about our reforms being squashed.

These perceptions are vital to the health of our democracy. If people believe that Parliament has no power or influence and that whatever promises we make will eventuthe-ally fail, how can we persuade people to vote, stand for elections and be involved in democracy?

People have to believe that Parliament genuinely speaks for them if they are to vote, and this can't be done if large parts of the legal system believe that it can seek to undo Acts of Parliament without any consequences for the health of our democracy.

This is not the same as saying that public opinion, however raw, should become law - which is the way some commentators have interpreted my murder-sentencing principles. Parliament's law-making process is usually a year of intense deliberation over finely worded, complicated pieces of legislation. This is the job of work which MPs and peers do, day in, day out.

We have to move away from a stand-off mentality in which parts of the legal profession respond to politicians with a "what's it to do with you?" attitude. I honestly believe that most lawyers and judges do want to see justice, not just procedural Pyrrhic victories.

I want that, too, as well as a system where judges can interpret the laws which have been clearly set out by a democratically elected Parliament.

AT the moment, we all too often have the worst of all worlds in which Parliament deliberates for months over laws which are then systematically undermined by overly aggressive judicial review decisions. There is a way forward here. The legal profession must embrace reform of the criminal justice system, not carp from the sidelines. Like most people, I respond better to an honest dialogue than to being shouted at.

A better relationship between the judges, barristers and politicians has to recognise our mandate as public representatives and not treat public opinion as something inherently disdainful which has no role in the formulation of law.

We all have to pause and draw breath at the scale and scope of judicial review and interpretations of the Human Rights Act if we are not to have spat after spat about the consequences.

A mature, clear legal system is one of the foundations of a democratic society. We all have a responsibility not to destroy the ground all of us want to stand on.