John Jackson chairs the law firm Mishcon de Reya, is a director of openDemocracy and History Today and is on the committee of Unlock Democracy.

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John Jackson (London, Mishcon de Reya): Here in California, eight hours behind British time, I have only just got round to reading Henry Porter’s excellent article in last Sunday’s Observer.

His call for a Bill of Rights with entrenched privacy laws may well be echoed strongly during the important Convention on Modern Liberty to be held next February and, hopefully, echoed with the rider that the protections we already have under the Human Rights Act should not be trimmed away.

John Jackson (London, Mishcon de Reya): Ahem!  Whilst I agree with most of what has been said about the Damian Green affair – particularly the activities of the police, there is an awkward aspect which is in danger of being stuffed under the carpet.

Parliamentary Privilege – a hugely important part of our unwritten constitution -  evolved well before political parties and their activities were a part of our landscape. It was, and is, an essential part of the way in which we, all of us, are protected from the abuse of power by those in control of the state. It is our protection and those who are elected by us to serve in Parliament, our MPs, have a duty to remember that in all their dealings. It is not just a rule of their playground!

John Jackson (London, Mishcon de Reya): The texts of Nick Herbert's public speeches sometimes give the impression of having been drafted first by a well informed assistant, with a sound knowledge of our constitutional history, and then given a ‘going over’ by Herbert to provide a (Conservative Party) politically correct gloss. The result can read in an oddly disjointed – almost Palinist -  way. This is a pity: it diminishes the value of serious attempts to discuss serious questions in a serious way. The public lecture commenting on a decade of the Human Rights Act, sponsored by the British Institute of Human Rights and delivered by Herbert yesterday at the site of the British Library’s Taking Liberties exhibition is a striking example of this.

Despite the disjunctions, some good, and some bad,  points emerged clearly from  Herbert’s lecture.

He was right to:-

• Warn against the dangers of judicial activism;
• Emphasise that human rights cannot have meaning, or exist, without popular consent;
• Say ‘ – in society we have responsibilities to one another.’ and ’- there is a danger that rights become not tools for protecting the individual within society, but advancing the individual against society.’

• Argue that judicial activism has been accelerated by the Human Rights Act which has undermined parliamentary sovereignty and the separation of the powers;
• Imply that popular consent can only be expressed through parliamentary representation;
• Suggest that the best way for our society to ‘re-balance’ rights and responsibilities is via a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities proposed by a (Conservative) government and, following debate, converted by a (Conservative) government dominated parliament into an Act ‘preventing judge-made law’ and restoring ‘the place of parliament’.

John Jackson (London, Mishcon de Reya): At the end of her judgement in the BAE case one of the law lords, Lady  Hale, said “- - I would wish that the world was a better place where honest and conscientious public servants were not put in impossible situations such as this - - -“. I would wish that too. I would also wish that people and nations did not seek to advance their interests by violence or the threat of violence. If that were so there would be no need of armaments industries and questions of national security could be dealt with in a more open and satisfactory way.

The impossible situation to which Lady Hale referred was the dilemma confronting the Director of the SFO in deciding, with incomplete information, whether, to quote Lord Bingham, “the public interest in pursuing an important investigation into alleged bribery was outweighed by the public interest in protecting the lives of British citizens”. The incompleteness of information available to the Director is the link to my second wish and my remark about how questions of national security are dealt with.

John Jackson (London, Mishcon de Reya ): Doubtless some, perhaps many, will be disappointed by the unanimous decision of five law lords to overturn the judgement delivered, and probably crafted, by Lord Justice Moses in the Serious Fraud Office’s BAE case. And those disappointed will include some who have convinced themselves that the Blair government acted cravenly to protect the commercial interests of BAE - a large employer and taxpayer - or even that this all fitted in with a longer term plan by Blair himself to grease his passage, post-premiership, to a position from which he could enjoy the trappings of international office and advance the interests of his friends in the United States in the maintenance of oil supplies from the Middle East.