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Good morning. More than 3000 years ago under the charismatic leadership of Moses, the people of the Bible were given divine laws to govern their life together. These were received by the early Christians and the central ones became the foundation of Western civilisation. The very existence of the supreme court, which has been so much in the news this week, is a witness to the continuing importance of law in our society. However, that court only came into existence in 2005. Before then, if you went into the House of Lords you would have seen, sitting on a seat before the throne, a bewigged figure-the Lord Chancellor, arguably the most important figure in public life. For at that time the Lord Chancellor was not only a senior member of the government and a member of parliament, but the head of the judiciary and final legal appeals took place in the House of Lords. This offended constitutional purists, who thought that the judiciary, government and parliament ought to be separate. So now we have a supreme court, entirely independent of government. The significance of this we saw in 2019 when the supreme court held that the early prorogation of parliament by the then government was illegal, and again on Wednesday with their ruling on sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. This separation of powers does I believe reflect a wise and deeply Christian understanding of human life. Its basis was succinctly stated by the American theologian and political thinker Reinhold Niebuhr when he wrote ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.’ There is in all human beings a spark of decency and this means we can elect governments that really do work for the common good. But there is also in us human beings an inclination to pursue our own interests at the expense of other people and when this is expressed in government it can be very damaging. So we need checks and balances on government, of which an independent judiciary is one. This is why one of the first signs that a country is moving away from democracy to autocracy or dictatorships is when a government tries to control the judiciary and appoint only judges who will do its bidding. Of course individual laws are made by humans and the result of discussion and agreement. But at the heart of law is the conviction that what holds us together as a society are moral obligations; and this remains fundamental. The principle behind Wednesday’s judgement is that even, or rather specially, democratically elected governments are accountable to the law.