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Dear Miss Millinger, Many thanks for your informative contributions – and please be assured that I didn’t suspect you of being the same Anon as 08:22! I have to confess to not having read the SC judgment, neither (despite having had some involvement in parliamentary agency years ago) am I a constitutionalist. I assumed that the order had been made under the negative resolution procedure merely in order to give the SC-supremacists the benefit of the doubt; and while I agree that neither affirmative or negative procedure can realistically ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny, the fact remains that the power to make such orders has been conferred by parliament on the minister, that it could have been limited if parliament had so wished (e.g. no power to set fees above a certain threshold?), and that any particular increase by order is subject in one way or another to parliamentary approval. It therefore still seems to me mistaken to assert that the ruling somehow vindicates the role of parliament at the expense of the executive. On the contrary, it can be seen as one more step (however “elegant” and closely argued) in the tendency of the SC to transmute into a Supreme Court on the American model – something which Anon 8:22 would apparently approve of. MM.

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