ADMINISTRATIVE LAW AND JUDICIAL REVIEW – THE PRACTICAL EFFECTS QF DEVELOPMENTS OVER THE LAST 25 YEARS ON ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

The writer of this article served in the legal civil service from 1951–1984, mainly in the Board of Trade and its successor departments but from 1980–1984 as Treasury Solicitor. The article reflects his personal views based on this experience. Its theme is that, although access to the courts has been made easier for the citizen aggrieved by an administrative decision, and court procedure has been greatly improved, the course of administration has been less dramatically affected – in fact little, if at all, by some important earlier cases. Nevertheless the spirit of administrative law is now becoming more widely diffused, the areas which are not subject to review are becoming less and a number of specific doctrines have been developed which affect administration. The following are particularly emphasized: (1) the courts’restrictive view of the ‘Wednesbury’ doctrine and their tendency to find other grounds to overide decisions which they find objectionable or unreasonable – a tendency which causes real administrative difficulty; (2) the recently enunciated doctrine of legitimate expectation whose limits are uncertain but which may have considerable effect on administration in future; and (3) the requirement that a person affected by a policy should be given an opportunity to show that he is a special case. Finally the writer has to emphasize that his personal experience ended in August 1984 when he retired. In a large organization such as the civil service a change of ethos is slow. He is assured by some, particularly Mr John Bailey cb , his successor as Treasury Solicitor, who has read this article in draft, that he understates the degree to which concepts of administrative law are infusing the whole spirit of administration, and even more directly, the short-term effects in individual departments such as the Department of the Environment which has been the subject of long-running campaigns directed by other bodies against it through the courts.     

The Development of the Scout Movement in Nigeria

The writer of this article is Chief Scout Commissioner for Nigeria,where a West African Jamboree is being held at Lagos in February.Although Scouting has not yet been developed in the region toany great extent, the possibilities are great, and it is interestingto recall that M. Eboué made specific reference to itssocial value in Africa in one of the last of his memoranda.     

‘There Can Be No Revolution without Culture’: Reading and Writing in the Bolivarian Revolution

Under Hugo Chávez's ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, the government made itself present in all stages of literary production, applying the official idea of reading and writing as ‘socialist practices’. The Bolivarian government envisaged a popular counter‐hegemony, courting popular support while delegitimising cultural elites and reinforcing class tensions. Bolivarian cultural policy is anachronistic in an age of global literary markets, while the emphasis on a national collective of writers over internationally promoted representative writers of the revolution is particularly radical.     

Rejecting Change

正British voters overwhelmingly reject an alternative voting system The British electorate,in only the second ever national referendum held in their history (the first was on joining the EU,over 35 years ago) rejected alterations to their voting system from the current first-past-the-post system to a form of alternative voting similar to that used