Dinsdale Piranha, the Supreme Court, and the death of the separation of powers

Montesquieu taught us that liberty survives only where power is divided. The executive, the legislature, and the judiciary must restrain each other, or tyranny will follow. The Supreme Court’s recent judgment in Shvidler v FCDO; Dalston Projects Ltd v Secretary of State for Transport [2025] UKSC 30 shows how far that principle has collapsed. Instead of acting as a constitutional check, the Court has reduced itself to a rubber stamp for civil servants and ministers.

Sanctions and their human cost

The Russian sanctions regime is the first of its kind to result in more than 1,500 people being designated in a matter of months (most of them without ever being accused of a crime). The effect of these measures is sweeping, they freeze assets, cutting off access to private healthcare at a time when NHS waiting lists leave people waiting months , sometimes years, for essential treatment. They block the payment of school fees, meaning children are forced out of the classrooms they know, losing teachers and friends, with their education disrupted mid-stream.

Most ordinary people know what it feels like to worry about getting timely medical care, or to see children’s futures shaped by the quality of schooling available. Few may feel sympathy for the wealthy, but this is not about luxury - it is about whether families can keep their children learning without interruption, and whether people can receive urgent treatment when they need it most. The rule of law demands that sanctions be applied with due process, and the separation of powers exists precisely to protect everyone, rich or poor, from the unchecked excesses of government.

For those unfamiliar, Yes Minister was a long-running BBC political satire in the 1980s, later followed by Yes, Prime Minister. Its central characters, the well-meaning but easily manipulated Minister Jim Hacker, his smooth and evasive civil service chief Sir Humphrey Appleby, and the pedantic Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley, offered a comedic but razor-sharp portrait of how government actually works. 

In that world, Sir Humphrey would dress up any policy failure as cautious inevitabilities that is to say regrettable but necessary, Bernard would correct the terminology, and Hacker would nod along believing himself in charge. In the current sanctions regime, reality has started to imitate that satire. These restrictions could easily be described asregrettable side-effects, borne not by ministers, but by the families caught in the crossfire. 

The Dinsdale philosophy

In Monty Python’s sketch, Dinsdale Piranha nails a man’s head to the floor for breaking “the unwritten law.” The victim admits he never knew what law he had broken was, Dinsdale never told him, but Dinsdale’s word was “good enough” for him.

This absurd logic now passes for judicial reasoning in the highest court of the land. In the Phi case, the government argued that immobilising a yacht owned by Sergei Naumenko (who is not designated ie sanctioned) would somehow increase “cumulative pressure” on Russia. They wheeled out a civil servant, James Driver, who solemnly declared that sanctioning the yacht would “encourage opposition to the regime” (para 186). His evidence was untested. But for the Supreme Court, that was good enough. If Mr Driver said so, they would accept it.

The difference between Monty Python and the Supreme Court is that in the sketch everyone knew it was a joke.

The farce does not stop there. When Transport Secretary Grant Shapps announced the Phi’s detention, he basked in the cameras, claiming the yacht was linked to a sanctioned individual. The Court of Appeal found his statements to be at best inaccurate, at worst misleading (para 66), and the Supreme Court acknowledged the same. Yet rather than strike the measure down, the justices upheld it on the basis that “sanctions work cumulatively” and ministers must be given a wide margin of appreciation (para 130).

The Transport Secretary (Grant Shapps MP) departed from the communication plan prepared for him by officials and made a public statement that was untrue that th Phi belongs to someone who is a “friend of Putin”. But Mr Naumenko is not in fact assessed to be a friend of President Putin. The Court of Appeal were rightly critical of Mr Shapps’ statement: para 86. However, they endorsed the view of Sir Ross Cranston that this did not ultimately affect the decision under review. The decision to issue the Phi Direction was in accordance with the recommendation made to Mr Shapps by his officials with supporting reasons and thereafter two further decisions were taken by the Transport Secretary in relation to the Phi. (para, 66)

So we now inhabit a legal order where ministers can mislead the public, civil servants can spin theories, and the Supreme Court will still nod it through. This is not judicial review. It is judicial surrender.

The cumulative effect mirage

The doctrine of ‘cumulative effect’ has become the government’s universal excuse. The Court held that it need not show a specific sanction works, only that, when piled together with thousands of others, it might (para 197). But sanctions have been piling up since 2022. More than 2,000 people and entities have been targeted. Three years on, the war continues. If cumulative effect were a serious test, reality would have validated it already.

Instead, the Court treat ‘cumulative effect’ as a magic incantation: repeat the phrase enough and evidence becomes unnecessary. Proof is displaced by plausibility; rights are crushed by conjecture.

Judicial abdication in action

Eugene Shvidler, a dual US–UK national, is left unable to use his own money, even to buy food, without a licence (paras 261–262). Naumenko’s yacht remains immobilised despite him never being designated. Their challenges were funnelled through section 38 SAMLA, which in theory protects rights, but in practice has become a hollow ritual. Reviews are paper-based, disclosure is limited, cross-examination is absent, and ministers can bolster their case after the fact.

The Supreme Court then declares itself “wholly unqualified” (para 193) to question ministerial judgments about whether the measures will “work.” But this is precisely what the separation of powers demands courts must do. By abdicating that role, the justices have subjugated judicial oversight to the will of civil servants and spin-happy politicians.

Why it matters

Sanctions are not temporary. They are now embedded as a permanent tool of government. Once established, they will be wielded again and again, against new groups, in new crises, by ministers just as eager to score headlines. If the courts refuse to scrutinise the evidence, then the power to dispossess people of property and livelihood rests unchecked in the hands of the executive.

History tells us where this leads: surveillance powers created for emergencies are now everyday intrusions into private life. And now sanctions, blunt, destructive, life-cancelling, can be imposed without meaningful judicial scrutiny.

The courts are supposed to be our last defence. Instead, in Shvidler and Phi, they played the part of Stig in the Monty Python sketch: “He never told me what I’d done wrong, but if he said it, that was good enough for me.”

That is not oversight. That is abdication. And it is the gravest threat to liberty in Britain since the Second World War and we saw what happened to the courts and judicial process in Germany in the late 1920’s and 1930’s. And yet the tone from the judiciary has begun to resemble an episode of Yes Minister: ministers spin, civil servants nod, and the judges, like Jim Hacker, go along with the show, convinced they are in charge while the real power lies elsewhere.