First delivered at the Margaret Thatcher Centre’s Freedom Festival, held at the University of Buckingham on March 21st, 2026.
The rule of law is one of our greatest exports and, properly understood by all good small-c conservatives, vital to our constitution. But too often of late, we have allowed our ideological opponents to capture and invert the most vital and English of concepts.
The rule of law is fundamental to the freedoms that we have enjoyed in this country for centuries: the right to a fair trial, the right to petition government, the right not to be unlawfully detained, the freedom to vote in free and fair elections, freedom of speech, and freedom from arbitrary power.
Mrs Thatcher understood this better than anybody. She consistently argued that rule of law was the indispensable foundation of a free, democratic society, famously arguing that “liberty can only flourish under a rule of law”, best articulated in her European Foundation speech of 1996. She said that the “first duty of government” was to uphold the law, asserting that it must prevail over “the rule of the mob” and that nobody is above it.
I am afraid to say, however, that the concept which traditionally safeguarded our freedoms is now being wielded to limit many of them.
We have a duty to restore the proper constitutional role of the Rule of Law in the best interests of this great nation. Many of you will know that Donal Blaney has set up the Rule of Law Institute to do exactly that.
Discussion of the rule of law has traditionally been the purview of lawyers, but it belongs first and foremost to the British people. Time and again, this country’s finest legal minds — judges, barristers and Attorney Generals — have wrestled with the concept. So today, I address you not as a lawyer, but as a humble Member of Parliament and someone who believes in the King-in-Parliament’s sovereignty. I will outline where we have gone wrong and set out a distinctly conservative vision of the rule of law. Indeed, without this conservative vision, the notion of the rule of law undermines parliamentary sovereignty and many of the shared assumptions on which our system rests.
British constitutional tradition
We must begin by reclaiming the history of our constitution.
The rule of law did not come about by chance, nor was it invented by the late Lord Bingham. It was forged by our forebears in great constitutional battles — whether that’s Magna Carta, sealed in my constituency, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights or the Act of Settlement. These asserted that no one, not even the king, was beyond the authority of the laws of the land, that arbitrary power could not be wielded with impunity or without consent.
Importantly, these moments were always framed as reclamations of “the true, ancient and indubitable rights of the people of this kingdom” (Blackstone), not the divination of new ones.
Following from the common law tradition, the laws of our land are discovered through precedent as judges handle concrete cases, rather than through an abstract civil code. Our liberties are inherited through a tradition that is uniquely English. Summarising Dicey, Professor Martin Loughlin puts it this way: “This safeguarding of our liberty through the workings of the ‘rule of law’ contrasts sharply with the modern practice of formal declarations of rights… in the English tradition ‘constitutional principles’ are induced from various court rulings on personal rights.”
For this to work, the constitution must live within the heart of the British people. It is this, more than anything, that accounts for our intuitive sense of British fair play, of the rule of law, and of proportionality.
In other words, we are presumed free unless the law says explicitly says otherwise… freedom from, not freedom to. That is why English liberty is both truly liberating and fundamentally conservative. Unlike those on the continent, Englishmen have never had to consult the statute book to request permission from the state. It has always been the state’s job to justify its reasons to us for any constraints.
I think this is why the British people more easily recognise abuses of arbitrary power: whether that’s the arrest of Graham Linehan or Lucy Connolly for social media posts, the curtailing of free speech through an Islamophobia definition or plans to cut back on jury trials. The civil liberties we have come to enjoy are an inheritance of centuries: the product of a whole tapestry of constitutional moments, court rulings and traditions. They are, as Mrs Thatcher said,““uniquely embedded in the political culture of the English-speaking peoples”.
Properly understood, the rule of law is both the product of this inheritance – and a vital means by which it is protected.
Definition
In this context, the rule of law is exceptional – but its definition is also remarkably simple.
David Starkey put it best: for the most part the rule of law is “a grand but nebulous concept which meant little more in practice than due process.”
In essence it means that judges apply laws passed of precedent and by Parliament, objectively, to everyone, without fear or favour. Citizens should know the rules well in advance and those rules should apply equally to all. Under this system, the rule of law provides a framework within which citizens can trust one another, while checking the Government from changing the rules on a whim through secondary legislation or prerogative power.
It may sound straightforward, but it is a luxury won for us by our ancestors. The people of China, North Korea, Russia, and many other parts of the world subject to tyrannical regimes will testify to that fact.
The Blairite constitutional settlement
But we have been guilty of taking this luxury for granted, for assuming that the norms which safeguard our freedoms would last forever, and that harmony between Parliamentary sovereignty and the judiciary was built into the system. In the vacuum we left, our opponents have stepped. They have wielded this sacred notion to bind the hands of Parliament by turning political questions into legal ones, courtesy of the Blairite constitutional upheaval.
We have acquiesced to the late Lord Bingham’s much broader definition of the rule of law, which helped create the legal Goliath we see today. His most famous work of the same name is now on the reading list for law students across the country.
If the law is now, as Bingham described it, a “universal secular religion,” then Sir Keir Starmer and his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, are its most devout priests. They believe that law is an end in itself and that every problem of government can be resolved if only we study existing statutes hard enough. It is an utterly arrogant view of public life: in the name of the “rule of law” we are now ruled by lawyers.
This is why this Government are willingly looking to give up sovereign British territory in the Indian Ocean; why our veterans are endlessly pursued through the courts, and why we must seemingly consult an expansionary definition of international law before defending our sovereign territory from attacks by the Iranian regime. Meanwhile, the tendrils of the law now reach into every function of the state through judicial review – whether in planning, energy, or immigration policy.
The creation of the Supreme Court, physically separating the judiciary from Parliament, went a long way to foster the idea that Parliament and the law sit in competition rather than in tandem. Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement: all were checks on overreaching executive power. Yet today, these same precedents are used by those on the left to check democratic authority and frustrate political change.
In the words of Professor Richard Ekins KC, the Whitehall machine now seeks “to safeguard against arbitrary power by treating all power as arbitrary.” The sacrosanct rule of law is used to block any change to the status quo, embedding managed decline.
Those of us on the right have too often stood by and allowed this to happen — and, in the case of the For Women Scotland ruling, even celebrated it. This was the ruling that told us what my young children already know: gender means biological sex. But we allowed a distinctly political question to be decided by a court, and the ruling could just as easily have gone against us.
When you treat politics and law as one and the same, you diminish the authority of both. The result is a system where law is wielded politically, applied with inequity, unpredictable and ultimately a threat to our democracy.
International law
Nowhere are these concepts more true than international law.
Those who worship the law now have reams of scripture to draw upon in the form of treaties, tribunals, and conventions. The most damaging of these being the ECHR, incorporated into our domestic system through the Human Rights Act. It has since become clear that the ECHR is a threat to our democratic institutions and can work directly against the national interest of member states.
At heart, this is not just a legal dispute but a clash of traditions. A clash between an uncodified Anglo-British system grounded in Parliament and precedent, and a European model that places far greater weight on codified rights and judicial interpretation.
A stark example arrived last year when the European Court of Human Rights effectively ordered Switzerland to enforce tougher climate mitigation measures. Swiss voters, in a referendum, had rejected certain greenhouse-gas targets. Yet the Strasbourg justices insisted that these democratic choices were incompatible with the Convention’s living instrument approach, compelling Switzerland to adopt additional steps – potentially including a national carbon budget or an equivalent.
That encapsulates the broader question: who decides major policy questions – voters acting through parliaments, or the verdicts of courts abroad?
We have seen the ECHR reach into governance in this country, preventing the deportation of illegal immigrants due to a child’s aversion to chicken nuggets or stopping a plane full of foreign national offenders on the runway. The “living instrument” principle means that European judges do not merely enforce but constantly re-interpret their own role to claim ever more authority: a practice which is inherently political.
When foreign bodies like the ECHR issue rulings that effectively rewrite domestic law or policy, the electorate rightly asks: “What is the point of democratic debate if the final word belongs to strangers who are unelected and beyond our reach?” From Swiss climate mandates to migration injunctions, the lesson is the same: our voters deserve the decisive say on major national questions. That principle is the bedrock of self-government.
Parliamentary Sovereignty
We must restore the balance by returning power to Parliament, to the elected and the electorate. To do so we must leave the ECHR and only engage with supranational bodies at our election to the extent that they protect our interests and those of our allies.
But there is a tendency on our side to invoke “Parliamentary Sovereignty” as if it too were an end in itself. Not only is this an oversimplification; it is politically counterproductive. It risks deepening the divide between the “Rule of lawyers” on one hand and demagoguery on the other.
We must instead win the argument to restore the delicate equilibrium.
Properly understood, the rule of law should support Parliamentary sovereignty, not compete with it. It should unify the nation by providing confidence that, even when the party you oppose is in power, it will still act predictably and fairly.
Instead, inflating the rule of law for political gain has increased polarisation. Take the Brexit Miller cases: they have perpetuated the idea among the Remain camp that there was some kind of illegality in the Brexit process. Once that Rubicon is crossed, it becomes far harder to disagree agreeably, and this is upstream of the civil unrest I’m afraid I see increasingly on the horizon today.
A Conservative vision
It is now time for those on the right to reclaim the rule of law – to restore its proper constitutional role so that it enhances Parliamentary democracy rather than restrains it. This is the conservative way.
It is about restoring the balance between the rule of law and Parliamentary Sovereignty which for too long we have allowed to drift out of all proportion.
We must reassert that Parliament is the supreme lawmaker, not lawyers. We should extoll the vast protections that already exist within the democratic system and the rich history of rights we enjoyed long before the ECHR. We must remind ourselves that the greatest bulwark against tyranny is not lawyers but voters.
We should be clear that restoring the true place of the rule of law is not a threat to civil peace but the only way to protect it. Diluting the power of voting only reduces faith in our democracy.
The independence of our judiciary is essential – independent from undue pressure, but also independent of its own political leanings. The judiciary should interpret the laws made by Parliament in good faith, not create them. It should be a shield, not a sword.
And MPs have a duty to draft better legislation: laws that are less open to being struck down in the courts or wilfully misinterpreted by civil servants. And we should reduce and repeal hundreds if not thousands of existing laws, every one of which is a restriction on our freedoms, many of which have not been properly justified to the people.
We should be clear that at its best the rule of law complements democracy more than it hinders it.
Conclusion
For too long, we have allowed the rule of law to be weaponised by our opponents. They have conflated the rule of law with the rule of lawyers, and they have rewritten our constitutional history to bend it to their will. We have allowed them to use this definition to their own political advantage and have for the most part stood by and watched them do it. A concept that is meant to maintain stability and safeguard democracy has become a threat to it. Our freedoms are now under fire wherever we look.
But we should take great faith from our history. Whenever our liberties have been threatened or suppressed before, we have always risen to the challenge. As Blackstone saw it “The vigour of our free constitution has always delivered the nation from these embarrassments” to reset “the balance of our rights and liberties to their proper level”.
We must never again take our freedoms and the conditions that created them for granted. We have to be vigilant and fight for them every single day and we must pass them on to each rising generation.
I take great faith from the fact that everyone here is resolutely committed to that task.
Thank you.
