IT was not too difficult to detect the dead hand of Jacob Rees-Mogg in the creation of the so-called Star Chamber of lawyers by the European Research Group of right-wing Brexiteers.
No-one doubts that Rees-Mogg has a grasp of history, it’s just his interpretation of history that leaves a lot to be desired, and hopefully setting up a Star Chamber will come back to bite him on the gluteus maximus – as a Latin scholar he’ll know that name.
For in choosing the name Star Chamber for his bunch of lawyers who will scrutinise Brexit, he has harked back to the days when privilege and power were in the hands of the few. It was actually set up by the Tudors to be a court that could check those who were too powerful, but by the reign of Charles I it was a byword for repression and arguably its activities were one of the causes of the English Civil War as the War of the Three Kingdoms is erroneously called.
Moggadon knows that if you give them incentive enough, lawyers will find a way to deliver the verdict you want, and that’s what the original Star Chamber eventually became – a court that did what the king wanted.
It’s yet another insult to Scotland, too, that the ERG set up and called the group the Star Chamber – an English creation in pre-Union times, even if the Scottish Stuart dynasty kept it going when James VI became James I as well.
And look at the membership – Sir Bill Cash, the DUP’s Nigel Dodds, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab, David Jones, Suella Braverman – her father hailed from Goa in India so would he have got into the UK under Theresa May’s hostile environment policies? – Michael Tomlinson, Robert Courts, and Martin Howe QC, chair of Lawyers for Britain. Not a Scot among them, with Scotland’s Parliament and Scots law ignored as well.
It’s another misnomer, too, because there’s not a star in their chamber, just a bunch of sycophantic lawyers determined to do what King Jacob tells them.
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