Attacking Supreme Court justices for doing their job has nothing to do with your rights

Have we learned nothing from ‘enemies of the people’ and the murder of Jo Cox?

No surprise that the justices of the Supreme Court are now regarded as “fair game”, for the simple offence that they issued a judgment that was unhelpful to the Brexit cause. Their friendships, salaries, homes, relatives, careers and everything else is now, it would seem, open to attack. The aim – and I wonder how the laws of libel shall operate in such a world – is to undermine confidence in their competence, their impartiality and their job as protectors of all our rights and freedoms, and above all to impute their judgement with improper motives. A disgrace, but one for which there will be, apparently enough, legal redress.

It is already happening. If you go for a stroll around the nuttier corners of the Leave Twittersphere, you will already see personalised attacks on the Supreme Court judges. They’re fairly pathetic. Sitting on the European Court of Human Rights, for example, is suggested as evidence for Europhiliac bias – even though the ECHR is not part of the EU and the UK ought to have representation on a body that sits in judgement on it.

Apparently some members of the Supreme Court are friendly with former newspaper editors. Some are well-off. Some charge the market rate for their services (just the same as a freelance journalist). And so on. It will no doubt get worse. The intrusions on their privacy and their honour will intensify. With no evidence whatsoever, we are asked to believe that they all voted Remain in the referendum. Maybe so, maybe not. Do any of them vote Conservative? Have they ever? It does not matter.

We do not want a world where, say, these judges criticise a Corbyn government for expropriating the playing fields of Eton, but their judgment is dismissed because “they’re all rich Tories, members of the 1 per cent” or some other claptrap.

No one in their right mind would invite Britain’s tabloid journalists to “bring it on”, and open up their mobile phones to the full hacking treatment. Yet the judges have nothing to hide. And it is also true that these slightly contrived attacks on the judges have no effect – admirably – on their bravery and dedication to the law. They are lawyers. They act on legal principles. They are not politicians, and have no wish to be. They were only asked to rule on these matters because the government abused its powers to suspend parliament for a prorogation. It is as simple as that.

If Boris Johnson had not tried it on with his “sharp practice”, as David Cameron calls it, none of this would have happened. Besides, the Supreme Court is often asked to consider politically sensitive issues of law, for example on employment law. It is in the nature of its role.

The truth is that the extreme Leavers and their media allies have been here before. Do you recall the infamous newspaper headline “Enemies of the People” in 2016? That was the rabid reaction to a previous judgment, and a vicious assault on the senior judges’ integrity (in that case the High Court of England). There was some stuff about one of them being a “former fencing champ”, as if that was evidence of some sort of moral turpitude, and another was “professionally at least, a committed Europhile”, whatever that’s supposed to mean – though it was also conceded he was on the “right” side in other cases so far as the newspaper was concerned. God help us.

But the point about the “Enemies of the People” episode is that it made no difference whatsoever to the independence of the judiciary. Indeed, it can now be seen to be counterproductive. It proves, were it needed, precisely how undemocratic and dictatorial the instincts of those who are now baying at what is now called, absurdly, the “Remain establishment”.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, called it a “constitutional coup”. Michael Gove suggests they are a just a bunch of academics chewing the fat – experts you might say the public have had enough of. They are, subtly, undermining the authority of the Supreme Court, by implying unworthy motives to the judges or querying their competence. This is dangerous talk, but for now at least the judges have held their nerve. No doubt finding some newspaper hack going through their bins or publishing photographs and addresses of their homes or running scurrilous articles about their children will be distressing to Lady Hale and her colleagues, but it will not work and will, as it has already, prove quite counterproductive.

Johnson does not resemble an engagingly refreshing “outsider” as is suggested. This product of Eton and Oxford is just as “establishment” as the newspaper editors and writers who pretend otherwise.

The 2016 referendum result has been wilfully misinterpreted as a sort of divine right to rule by a no-deal Eurosceptic extremist government, and it is no such thing. It is used as a trump card – the means justify the ends, Brexit “by all means necessary”. These personal attacks on the judges are in fact a sign of desperation – because Johnson’s Brexit strategy is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Only by breaking the law can he get his way. That is not a great place to be. That is why we are in this mess.

The judges should not be intimidated as they are in Italy or Venezuela or Iran, and be threatened with personal abuse and – not impossible – violence by newspapers and radicalised Leavers. Would some crazed activist try to attack a judge at home or in the street? The police say the fastest growing threat to security is coming from far-right extremism. Just remember the name Jo Cox, if you think such an event is unthinkable. It is not, and it tells us you everything you need to know about the dangers to life and limb, as well as our liberties.