The country's leading judge has hit out at plans to reform the asylum and judicial systems in his strongest outburst against the government yet.

Lord Woolf used a speech in Cambridge yesterday to slam the home secretary over his asylum appeals proposals.

David Blunkett's department was described as being a "catalyst for a campaign for a written constitution" in its determination to "prevent the courts from adjudicating" on the justice of asylum decisions.

The lord chief justice also accused the constitutional affairs secretary Lord Falconer of creating a "second class supreme court".