In a letter to Mr Cameron, Mr Miliband complains: «These
appointments would create an even bigger majority for the Coalition in the Lords and risk reducing its role to a
mere rubber stamp for the House
of Commons.»
[W] e believe that the central premise
of Argersinger — that actual imprisonment is a penalty different in kind from fines or the
mere threat
of imprisonment — is eminently sound, and warrants adoption
of actual imprisonment as the line defining the constitutional right to
appointment of counsel.
And this is what I understand to be the meaning
of our lawyers, when they say that these civil corporations are liable to no visitation; that is, that the law having by immemorial usage appointed them to be visited and inspected by the king their founder, in his majesty's court
of king's bench, according to the rules
of the common law, they ought not to be visited elsewhere, or by any other authority.53 And this is so strictly true, that though the king by his letters patent had subjected the college
of physicians to the visitation
of four very respectable persons, the lord chancellor, the two chief justices, and the chief baron; though the college had accepted this carter with all possible marks
of acquiescence, and had acted under it for near a century; yet, in 1753, the authority
of this provision coming in dispute, on an appeal preferred to these supposed visitors, they directed the legality
of their own
appointment to be argued: and, as this college was a
mere civil, and not an eleemosynary foundation, they at length determined, upon several days solemn debate, that they had no jurisdiction as visitors; and remitted the appellant (if aggrieved) to his regular remedy in his majesty's court
of king's bench.