PARTY POLITICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 March 1922, Page 5

PARTY POLITICS.

SHOULD A JUDGE SIDE? POSITION OF LORD CARSON. By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright. Received March 30, 5.5 p.m. London, March 27. Lord Carson specially attended the House of Lords and made a personal statement in reply to Lord Birkenhead’s criticisms. Lord Car Son declared that he had not broken any rule or tradition by participating in party politics while he was a judge; no rule against such participation existed. He instanced the cases of Lords Cairns and Macnaghten and present and past Lord Chancellors. Lord Carson asserted with emotion that Lord Birkenhead was trying to lay down an artificial line, to which he could not agree unless it was laid down by irreproachable authority, when he would, of course, obey if it were applied equally to all classes of law officers. lx>rd Carson asked: ‘ls my honor to be more besmirched than that of a chairman of Quarter Sessions, or Justices of the Peace, whose politics are well known?” Lord Carson said he did not object to an inquiry, nor to a change of the law, but if -made it should apply throughout, from the Lord Chancellor down to the humblest justice. “I am willing to resign the law Lordship if I have done anything wrong or the House so thinks,” he added. “What care I about my office or salary compared with my honor.” He concluded: “So long as I hold my present office the House may be perfectly sure the honor of justice will remain untarnished at my hands.”

Lord Birkenhead, replying, pointed out that he never made an observation that could be construed as a reflection, on the honor and integrity with which Lord Carson discharged his function* as a judge. In the past half century there had grown up a feeling that peers who were in the House because they were judges, should not participate in purely party debates. Lord Carson’s suggestion that every judge was entitto go on the platform and attack or defend the Government at will was a novel and a revolutionary doctrine, made for the first time in history. Some might think the anomalous position of the Lord Chancellor in this connection ought to be rectified. Lord Carson: “Hear, hear.” Lord Birkenhead said Lord Carson’s cheers evolved the conclusion that if the anomaly of the Lord Chancellor’s position should be swept away, other members of the judiciary should not be made suspect through contact with party politics. FURTHER SPEECHES. LORD CURZON’S STRONG POINT. NEW RULES OF HONOR AND TRADITION. Received March 30. 5.5 p.m. March 29. Lord Dunedin said he had never even spoken in the House previously in order not to give the man in the street a possible suspicion of a judge’s impartiality. Lord Finlay thought Lord Birkenhead’s remarks did not bind any of the other law Lords, as such a convention as was referred to did not exist. Lord Beauchamp said there had never been a clearer breach of custom than Lord Carson’s speech on a party platform. Lord Curzon said the convention that the law Lords should not participate in political debates was a counterpart of the convention that lay peers should not participate in judgments on appeals. He hoped it would not be necessary to translate the convention into a Written rule. Continuing, Lord Curzon said the House had subsisted mainly only on the instinctive recognition that the peers observed not merely the rules of honor, but tradition. If such rules were continually broken it would be necessary to draw up a rule that when a law" Lord accepted an appointment he accepted also certain obligations. The subject was then dropped.