The gratifying and important
striking down by the court of the recent illiberal anti-protest legislation doesn't seem to have got much press. I came across it here a bit belated in the Byline Times.
It could be judicially reviewed because the government introduced it through the back door by statutory instrument, which avoids a vote, but remains open to court oversight.
The Economist wrote a political obituary of Sunak when he called the election, pointing out that most of the things he has recently been pushing are things that not long ago he strenuously opposed. And when he says he has delivered this and that, as he tends to in his speeches these days, usually he it would be more accurate to say that he has failed to deliver them. The plan isn't working at all, and its objectives change from day to day.
It is pretty incompetent of a government to push through a statutory instrument that then gets struck down in judicial review. Usually you take great care to avoid that kind of thing happening. Previously, of course, this government tried to eviscerate judicial reviews, because of their allegation (which has some element of truth to it) that campaigners against something so often use JR as a delaying tactic, with no real prospect of stopping it, and that is part of why everything costs so much. But without proper judicial oversight, government could really misbehave, and that is the reason they encountered so much opposition trying to push through that legislation, that they ended up pulling the bill.
Sometimes I wonder if Sunak has been deliberately setting them up to fail in relation to those policies he is only agreeing to because he has to. The way he has gone about the Rwanda expulsions - another policy he opposed before he was prime minister - makes me think he didn't really want them to happen. Maybe he even called the election early in part so that there was no risk of them happening. Though in the cock-up vs conspiracy debate, the first is usually right.