ABSTRACT

For well over a century, first the trade union movement and then the Labour Party and its intellectual apologists have harboured deep suspicions, often extending to outright hostility, towards judges, magistrates and the entire legal profession, because of what the judiciary have seemed to represent and the class interests which its members have been seen to advance in their court judgments.12 Indeed, for nearly all the twentieth century only the continued existence of the Toryinclined hereditary peers as members of the House of Lords seemed to inspire a comparable sense of enmity in the breasts of those on the Left of British politics.