LORD CARSON

Southland Times, Issue 19479, 31 March 1922, Page 5

LORD CARSON

DEBATE IN THE LMDS HIS POLITICAL ACTIVITY CONDEMNED TRADITIONS OF OFFICE TO BE UPHELD. (By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright.) (Australian and N.Z. Cable Association.) LONDON* March 29. (Received March 30, 5.5 p.m.) Lord Carson specially attended the House of Lords and made a personal statement. In reply to Lord Birkenhead’s criticism, Lord Carson declared 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 Cairns, MacNaughton 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. Lord Carson asked: “Is my honour to be more besmirched than that of the chairman of the 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 law, but if made, it should apply throughout from the Lord Chancellor down to the humblest justice. Lord Carson said: “I am now willing to resign the law lordship if I have done anything wrong or the House so thinks. What care I about my office or salary compared with my honour? So long as I hold my present office the House may be perfectly sure the honour of justice will remain untarnished at my hands.”

Lord Birkenhead, in replying, pointed out that he never made an observation that could be construed as a reflection on the honour or integrity with which Lord Carson discharged functions 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 entitled to go on the platform to attack or defend the Government at will, was a novel and revolutionary doctrine made for the first time in the history of the House. Some might think anomalous the position of the Lord Chancellor in this connection and that ought to be rectified. Lord Carson: Hear, Hear! Lord Birkenhead said Lord Carson’s cheers involved 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. 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 judges’ impartiality. Lord Finlay thought Lord Birkenhead’s remarks did not bind any other Law Lords. Such convention as that referred to did not exist. Lord Beauchamp said there never had been a clearer breach of custom than Lord Carson’s speech on the 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 the House had subsisted mainly on the instinctive recognition that peers observed, not merely the rules of honour, but also those of 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.