IT’S been clear from the outset of the current PM’s term in office that this is a Tory government which abhors scrutiny. Shortly after he took office, Boris Johnson tried to shut parliament down completely because he was finding its scrutiny of the Brexit process tiresome. It took litigation to restore parliament to its rightful role.

An unlawfully prorogued parliament is dangerous for democracy but so is a supine one; because of the UK Government’s artificially inflated majority and its fear of due process and meaningful scrutiny Westminster is a sad shell of its former self.

Regulations impinging on our basic liberties during the Covid crisis have been rushed through with the minimum of debate. And it’s not just urgent covid-related legislation that is treated in such a cursory way. Earlier this week we saw the Policing Bill, a major piece of legislation affecting fundamental rights, sail through parliament without proper debate and scrutiny after a ridiculously short time allocation. A bill which will undermine the right to protest, and the right of the Gypsy Roma Traveller community to their very way of life went through parliament without proper discussion of its implications and without any sort of proper consideration of amendments.

Most of the MPs who had put in to speak didn’t get to do so and amendments tabled after painstaking inquiries such as the one we carried out on the Joint Committee on Human Rights were ignored.

The UK Government does not like evidence-based policy-making. In fact it doesn’t like evidence full stop. It likes to run the country free from scrutiny or accountability based on its Little Britain, “me-first” ideology and the personal ambition of ministers who look only to their mates for assistance in return for handsome remuneration and minimal record keeping.

The way in which they have handled the emergency Covid contracts typifies their approach. The sad thing for parliamentary democracy is that it is only through judicial processes, instigated by concerned citizens acting through the Good law Project (GLP), that the full scale of the UK Government’s chicanery has come to light.

Committees of the House of Commons have done their best to report on aspects of the sorry mess. They have pointed out that the need to act fast did not give the Government licence to rip up record-keeping on decisions which led to the awarding of multimillion-pound contacts to their friends and relations nor to fail to publish contracts within the stipulated time limits. But it’s been impossible to achieve parliamentary accountability or censure.

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Last November, the National Audit Office revealed that the Government awarded £10.5 billion worth of pandemic-related contracts without a competitive tender process in a VIP lane and that companies with the right political connections were 10 times as likely to win them. They found that there had been “insufficient documentation on key decisions” and on how “conflicts of interest have been identified or managed”. Still it has been impossible to achieve parliamentary accountability or censure.

The Good Law Project (GLP) has brought two successful legal challenges against the UK Government’s handling of pandemic-related procurements. The courts found that government ministers Matt Hancock and Michael Gove acted unlawfully.

The GLP has a significant number of similar judicial reviews in the pipeline so more judicial scrutiny is coming at the UK Government, despite their attempts to kick a judicial inquiry into the Covid crisis into the long grass.

But they can’t even accept what happened in court and have told porkies about the court decisions. They claim that the court did not find the Government guilty of any actual bias. But this is a total red herring. The GLP did not seek a finding of actual bias but rather apparent bias. Apparent bias is a legal term which is well understood.

Indeed, it was the reason why Alex Salmond won his civil action against the Scottish Government. The legal test for apparent bias is whether the circumstances would lead a fair minded and informed observer to conclude that there was a real possibility or real danger that the decision maker was biased.

That’s the test the court applied in the GLP case against the Cabinet office and the court found that yes indeed a fair-minded and informed observer would conclude that there was a real possibility or a real danger the UK Government awarded a significant contract to a company on the basis of bias.

That is to say the Cabinet Office awarded a lucrative contract on the basis of favouritism – and, even in a crisis that is illegal.

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The court process brought to light emails which otherwise would never have got into the public domain and which showed that The Guardian newspaper and Open Democracy had been right when they alleged institutionalised cronyism.

We also learned that Michael Gove instructed officials to commission research on “attitudes to the UK Union” using the emergency contract given to Public First for pandemic research, meaning taxpayers’ hard-earned cash was used to further the interests of the Tory party. And, oh yes, they’ve lied about that too.

THE sunlight shone on the Government’s dodgy dealings by these two judicial reviews shows why a judge-led inquiry into the Covid crisis is so important. Lying on oath is a very serious matter which, in a judge-led inquiry, would have the sort of repercussions that ought to mean most people will think twice before doing so.

Witnesses are less likely to get away with prevarication and obfuscation under questioning from lawyers supervised by a judge. The power to compel witnesses and the production of documents will be very important. The cat ate the paper trail, or the redaction pen as trusty shield approach to government won’t cut it with a judge-led inquiry. Obstructing judicial orders for documents is contempt of court and experience shows that that threat often brings to light records which haven’t yet made it to the virtual shredder.

There is something very wrong with British democracy when a government elected with only 43.6% of the UK-wide vote can rule like a dictatorship treating parliament as an inconvenience.

Seen from Scotland the situation is even worse. This UK Government has no mandate and the party which does, the SNP, is treated with contempt. In the last few days we have found out what most of us already suspected – that the PM has so little respect for democracy he wants to close Scotland’s Parliament down. He doesn’t need to worry too much about Westminster – he has already emasculated it.

Until the Scottish Parliament moves to use its mandate, hold a second independence referendum and get us out of this mess, using the law is the only way we can get to the truth of what this sleekit Tory government have been up to. No wonder they want to limit the scope and availability of judicial review and no wonder they fear a judge-led inquiry.