It depended on whether the first defendant was domiciled in the United Kingdom at the relevant date.The other was the court’s inherent jurisdiction to decide whether it had jurisdiction to try the issues in the action.The High Court was a court of unlimited jurisdiction. That did not mean that its jurisdiction was universal and unrestricted. It meant that, unlike inferior courts and tribunals, it had jurisdiction to decide the existence and limits of its own jurisdiction It followed that the judge’s decision should be set aside. It was not, however, appropriate for the Court of Appeal to exercise the discretion and accordingly the plaintiffs’ application would be restored for hearing by the judge.He would have to decide where the greatest risk of injustice lay, but to bear in mind that interlocutory hearings to establish the right to bring an action should not be turned into mini-trials of the action itself.His Lordship expressed his personal disquiet at a rule, said to be a rule of our own domestic law, which made the jurisdiction of the court depend on circumstances prevailing long after what, on any realistic appraisal of the position, was the commencement of the proceedings. As the present case demonstrated, such a rule was capable of working serious injustice, and might need to be reconsidered at the highest level.In the meantime it was at least arguably incumbent on the court not to aggravate the possible injustice by withholding the assistance which it could properly give to parties seeking to establish its jurisdiction at the relevant date.Kate O’Hanlon, Barrister. Welcome to the modern world – a place we have inhabited since last Friday morning. It is a place where you talk in a civilised fashion to your European neighbours, where a Secretary of State for the Environment can think aloud about road pricing, and where a Treasury minister can tackle monetary policy in the same way as foreign countries (such as Germany and the United States of America) where interest rates are consistently lower and price stability part of the natural order

Yesterday Gordon Brown did his bit for modernism.

By freeing day-to-day decisions by the Bank of England from Treasury supervision, he also pinned price stability on the Blair government’s masthead in a way which, for all their talk, Lady Thatcher’s and John Major’s Chancellors never managed. New Labour starts to acquire its own historic identity as the low-inflation party. (And, a bonus for a pro-European, Gordon Brown moves the British institutional set-up a good step nearer to the single currency norm.)
What the new Chancellor has done is both dramatic and banal. Dramatic because, at a stroke, he exorcises the ghosts of Montague Norman, Philip Snowden, Lord Cromer and Denis Healey. Banal, because he has done for money no more than umpteen councils have been doing for refuse collection. A public service – the pursuit of stable prices – has been contracted out.

The Bank of England gets a target for inflation and is invited to use its big gun – setting the price of money – to secure it. (A really radical Chancellor would have gone further and pegged the Governor’s salary to his success; a really, really radical Chancellor would have translated the Bank to a greenfield site in Docklands and flogged Threadneedle Street at a great profit, abolishing those chaps in salmon pink kit on the way.)What the Bank gets is freedom rather than independence. In the new model the Governor is an expert, expected to use professional discretion. There is a comparison to be made with the courts, although, unlike a judge, the Governor’s decisions will affect the livelihoods of many people – their domestic finances, their job prospects. It is appropriate, therefore, that he accounts for the Bank’s decisions. Gordon Brown is also turning that “he” into a collective, a Monetary Policy Committee, overlooked by a more representative Court. This reform ought usefully to allow non-City perspectives in.That word “representative” is ambiguous.

Why? Because part of the basic case for giving the Bank autonomy is that the markets trust the Bank more than elected politicians. Only bankers’ decisions will command, Gordon Brown said, “the necessary confidence”. By clear implication, markets trust politicians somewhat less. All the more reason to ensure that the Bank is held publicly to account.Gordon Brown is now free to concentrate on welfare-to-work and the next Budget.