The ruling that asylum seekers could continue to be housed in the Bell Hotel at Epping Forest should have been a minor matter of planning law and administrative competence. Instead, it has become another piece of theatre in the endless struggle to subordinate judicial independence to nationalist grievance. When Lord Justice Bean, sitting with two colleagues in the Court of Appeal, overturned a procedurally flawed High Court injunction, the legal reasoning was clear: the lower court had erred in principle, the council had delayed unreasonably, and the injunction risked producing greater injustice than it sought to prevent. This was not radical judicial activism. It was the judiciary doing its job.
Yet the judgement has been met with a chorus of denunciation. The Daily Mail seized on Lord Justice Bean’s decades-old affiliations: his chairmanship of the Fabian Society in 1989, his role in founding Matrix Chambers with Cherie Blair, his stint as treasurer for the Society of Labour Lawyers. These are presented as evidence of “apparent bias,” the suggestion being that his impartiality has been hopelessly compromised by ancient associations. The barrister Steven Barrett, who referred him to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, was explicit: Bean should never have heard the appeal at all.
Barrett is a familiar presence on GB News, where he delivers a performance of legal authority for an audience already primed to see the courts as a conspiracy against “the people.” His complaint to the JCIO is less about actual standards of conduct (no serious observer believes a Fabian role from the 1980s disqualifies a senior judge in 2025) than about producing a new scandal in the endless news cycle of betrayal. Judicial independence is not to be assessed by whether a judge applies the law correctly, but by whether the ruling aligns with the politics of migration and national sovereignty.
As I have said before, this is not a new tactic. During the Brexit years the Daily Mail denounced the High Court judges who ruled against the government as “Enemies of the People.” The strategy is always the same: the law is acceptable only when it confirms the politics of the right. A contrary ruling is never just wrong, it is illegitimate. By this logic, a judge with a Labour past is irredeemably biased, while one with lifelong Tory affiliations is merely an experienced member of the establishment.
The Epping case crystallises the authoritarian drift. If the court had upheld the injunction, it would have been celebrated as the people’s champion against an unaccountable Home Office. Instead, having ruled the other way, it is cast as partisan, compromised, corrupt. The implication is that the law must rule in favour of the nationalist cause, or be damned. The neutrality of judicial procedure is replaced with a populist test: are you with us, or with them?
There is something almost comic in the desperation of the smears. The Fabian Society of the late 1980s (a think-tank that churned out the more respectable social-democratic policy proposals of its time) is recast as a radical cell whose influence fatally taints anyone associated with it. In reality, Bean’s generation of Fabians produced the technocrats of the Blair era. To suggest this compromises his legal reasoning in 2025 is to confess that no judge with the faintest connection to Labour politics is acceptable. One wonders how far back the purges will go: should we exclude anyone who ever attended a Labour Party conference, wrote for a left-leaning journal, or joined a chambers associated with progressive causes?
The right’s outrage also reveals its double standard. When judges come from elite Tory chambers, when they have spent careers representing the interests of banks, corporations and Conservative governments, there is no talk of bias, no demand for recusal. Their politics is not political, merely the natural order of things. Only left associations are treated as ineradicable sins.
Even the most establishment figures are no longer safe from this logic. Lord Justice Bean is hardly a firebrand: a product of Westminster School and Oxford, a barrister who spent decades inside the most respectable chambers, a man elevated to the Court of Appeal by a Conservative government. His Fabian interlude belongs to the era of Kinnock and the SDP split, the least revolutionary moment imaginable. If even such a figure is now treated as an enemy of the people, the message is clear: nothing short of full-throated alignment with the rabid nationalism of the present will be enough. Judges may be old boys of the Inns of Court, the very embodiment of the establishment, but unless they parrot the rhetoric of GB News they are condemned as traitors in robes.
This reveals the deeper dynamic. The right is not content with judges who are cautious, conservative in temperament, or deferential to executive power – all qualities the English judiciary has traditionally supplied in abundance. What is demanded now is something else: a judiciary that is not merely prudent but partisan, that does not merely respect government but actively enforces the nationalist agenda. Even the most impeccably establishment judges will fail that test, because their very function (to apply law according to principle rather than prejudice) disqualifies them. The more the nationalist movement radicalises, the narrower the space becomes for judicial independence of any kind. In the end, the only acceptable judge will be one who is not a judge at all, but an apparatchik.
The real danger is not to Lord Justice Bean, who is unlikely to be censured, but to the concept of judicial independence itself. If the expectation hardens that judges must rule in favour of “the people” (as defined by GB News and the Mail) then any neutral application of the law becomes suspect. That prepares the ground for authoritarian override: why bother with the courts at all, if their decisions can be pre-emptively delegitimised whenever they are inconvenient?
In that sense, Barrett’s complaint is not just a sideshow. It is part of the ongoing attempt to transform the judiciary into an auxiliary of nationalist politics, a process that began with Brexit and has accelerated under the politics of migration. The law must either rule for the right, or be condemned as corrupt. That is the choice the right wants to impose.
What is at stake in Epping is not the fate of a single hotel but the terms on which judicial authority is accepted at all. A politics that cannot accept an unfavourable ruling without denouncing the judge as biased has already abandoned the principle of an independent judiciary. It has replaced the rule of law with the rule of partisanship in robes. Be warned, that is the road that leads not to sovereignty but to authoritarianism.
