Gareth Dennis has been a public figure for a while, appearing on BBC News a few times. So there was apparently a provision for this in his contract with Systra: https://x.com/GarethDennis/status/1829053692508623154
> [Gareth's] passion and enthusiasm for all things rail are well-known across the sector through his weekly #Railnatter podcast and as a regular national press rail commentator
There is a body of constitutional law. There is extensive law governing what powers ministers have - powers are granted to them by legislation.
There are human rights granted by law and treaty. Everything from some clauses of the Magna Carta that are still in force https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofp... to the European Convention on Human Rights.
In that sense, Britain does not have a constitution. Obviously it has a constitution in some sense, because there is always some set of laws, norms, traditions, and historical precedents that constitute the basis of government. But this is a much weaker sense of the term. For instance, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was a “constitutional” law that supposedly made it impossible to call a snap election, but a snap election was nonetheless called in 2019 via the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019, which only required a simple majority because it had equivalent authority to the FTPA itself.
Well, that's not actually in the US constitution.
And, the Executive branch is free to ignore what the Judicial branch [1] does since ya know, it's the Executive branch that would execute any decisions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nation_v._Georgia#Aft...
It's a rather simple application of the premises that (a) the Constitution supersedes other statutory laws and (b) the courts have jurisdiction over disputes about the application of the law.
As for the trial of Charles I - that was anything but a kangaroo court. Great care was taken to give him a fair trial, while establishing the principle that no-one was above the law.
Much better than it is for the UK. Most of the rights protected in the Bill of Rights was carried over from English common law. Britain has since explicitly abolished some of them and openly carves out exceptions to the others. How many people in Britain have been jailed for mean tweets?
> You have a supreme court which has just decided that the president is effectively outside the reach of the law.
That’s a false oversimplification of that ruling.
> As for the trial of Charles I - that was anything but a kangaroo court. Great care was taken to give him a fair trial, while establishing the principle that no-one was above the law.
Charles I, the king, was charged with treason, which was defined prior to that trial as disloyalty to the king. The king was disloyal to the king? It’s complete nonsense and they were clearly making it up as they went along.
The English Civil War was a violent revolution that overthrew the previous system of government and imposed a new one by force of arms. I’m not against that in principle but at least the American revolutionaries were honest that that’s what they were doing.
This is called "English common law" and it is a feature American law shares with many other English-speaking countries.
It is very odd that after 200 years of independence they realised that they had failed to realised that the constitution granted a right to have an abortion, and then a few decades later realised that it did not after all.
It feels very much that you have a different arm of the government (the judiciary) making laws in place of the legislature.
Historically it also took a while to get the thirteenth amendment so the constitution was pretty seriously flawed for a very long time.
On the other hand the free speech protections are something I envy.
No. Originalism is just a form of textualism; it’s based on the “original public meaning” of the law as written. This is a common misunderstanding. The point of originalism is that you can’t interpret a law written in the 18th century as if it was written in the 21st century because language usage changes over time. There’s no good faith reason for it to be the sort of bogeyman it’s become.
https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-convention/landmark-...
As you know human rights existed long before somebody decided to sign away our interpretation of them to a foreign body.
Weird how the right to liberty and security doesn't apply to native populations.
Even self defence is a dubious right here.
People are sacked all the time in the US for bringing their employer into disrepute, and it doesn't even matter whether they actually did or not, since the employer doesn't have to give a reason anyway.
Id also point out that the UK is generally an extremely poor country, living standards for the majority are low, income is extremely low after taxes, especially compared to the states.
Britain compares itself unfavourably to the US on almost every metric that matters.
Most Ministers are just political appointees anyhow - the actual work is done by the Civil Service.
He's way, way than more than just some guy who has been rail minister for a month, he's one of the most respected, perhaps the most respected transport executive in Britain(at least until yesterday). He's not an elected politician, he has worked professionally in rail transportation since 1975.
For 10 years he was Chief Executive of Transport for London which runs all public transport in London. Following that, for the past 10 years he was and still is Chairman of Network Rail, the organisation which is responsible for the entire British Railway Network. It's in this capacity that he sent the letter, not as a minister.
Unless this turns into some huge scandal, which seems unlikely, he'll be fine.
______________
[1] More specifically, a Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Except it doesn't really have a constitution.
To become a minister, that person needs to be an official politician. Part of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. So if a sitting UK government wants an expert in their cabinet who is not an MP, they ennoble them. They make the person a Lord to get them to be able to operate officially as a minister in the government.
For a fuller explanation see: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/direct-m...
[1] i.e. a seemingly weird thing that the British do because of old traditions
Absolutely. He's guilty of precisely what he complains about. He suggests that this engineer is implicating the "safety of Network Rail" whereas he's just implicating the safety of a _single decision_.
Instead of reacting to a single statement the minister has decided to implicate his entire job. Which is madness. He should be deeply ashamed of how he abused his position, and quite frankly, for his inability to accept and react appropriately to criticism.
A giant baby if I've ever seen one.
This is what a current official did prior to him becoming the minister while an executive of a rail company.
So the analysis and the discussion below all stem from a faulty premise
This is exactly the problem why the world sucks so hard.
The engineer, certainly knowledgeable in this field, made a measured public remark, which could have saved lives. He has done nothing wrong, because he didn't claim to speak on behalf of his employer, and has the right to speak his mind as a person. In public, and with a lot of reach.
The government official, however, applied unconstitutional pressure to get the engineer fired and threatened his employer to lose business. Humanly very low and damaging to future public rail infrastructure, if a capable company is not allowed to provide services anymore and therefore most likely to increase prices through diminished competition.
If anyone should lose their job over this matter, it clearly should be the UK rail minister.