. . .
Happily both our countries have a robust independent judiciary, the value of which cannot be underestimated . . .
Thank you for your gracious opening, but I am afraid I have to disagree with the above.
One of the primary roles of the United States Supreme Court is to protect individuals, whose liberties are guaranteed to them by the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States, against the popular, majority will of the legislature. In America if two wolves vote to eat the lamb, the Supreme Court steps in and invokes the Bill of Rights to protect the lamb.
Unfortunately (from an individual liberty point of view) for English subjects, and the people in all majority rule systems with no structural judicial protection for political minorities, which is most countries in Western Europe, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (established only in 2009) has no jurisdiction to protect political minorities from tyranny by parliamentary majorities. In majority rule systems such as the United Kingdom if two wolves vote to eat the lamb, then the lamb is history.
The focus by the political culture and the political system of the United States on the rights of the individual represents the sharpest difference in political philosophy between America and Western European democracies. The failure to recognize and to understand this fundamental difference in political philosophy helps to explain why Western Europeans often are baffled by the machinations of the political and the judicial systems in America.
(Tom, thank you very much for your immediately preceding post enforcing the ban on political discussion. I apologize for getting somewhat close to the line in my own posts on this thread.
Please know that I consider this post to be purely of a comparative political science nature, and to not be in the nature of the political discussion we proscribe on WBF.)