Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Learn its name and fear it.
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which is currently going through the House of Commons, removes the need for reforms to be placed before the house. It will allow ministers to take an exisiting law and repeal, reform or replace it. The only "safeguard" is that the benefits must outway the drawbacks, but this decision will be left to the ministers want to put through the reform in the first place.
The reason being given for the Bill is that the world is running too quickly for our current democratic process - there is a real need to cut through red-tape, but putting a Bill through Parliament to excsise redundant laws takes too long. This is, surprise surprise, a lie. Departments are too slow in identifying such laws, and too slow in drafting replacements. What is more, the Government is generally not very good at drafting its Bills - as a certain Iraq protestor can testify.
The measure is unconstitutional and should be stopped. The Government pays lip-service to a need to tackle voter apathy, but voters are currently more impotent than they have been for thirty years - why vote when it makes no difference? When ministers start calling the shots irrespective of the will of the House then democracy ends.
It will further undermine the democratic process for the introduction of new Bills. Say, just to pluck an example out of the air, Charles Clarke concedes that the ID scheme will only move from its present form of creeping compulsion to one more compulsion on the introduction of a separate Bill. He will remove the particular piece of enabling legislation in the Bill. With the Bill in place, and the Home Office unsurprisingly fails to meet its 80% take-up by 2012 goal, there is nothing to stop Mr Clarke, or whoever is filling his chair by that point, saying "well there's clearly a case for enforced registration because we're currently spending stupid amounts of money and not getting any of those many benefits back" and just revising the Bill accordingly. Thus, with the L&RRB on the cards, there can be no further concessions...
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which is currently going through the House of Commons, removes the need for reforms to be placed before the house. It will allow ministers to take an exisiting law and repeal, reform or replace it. The only "safeguard" is that the benefits must outway the drawbacks, but this decision will be left to the ministers want to put through the reform in the first place.
The reason being given for the Bill is that the world is running too quickly for our current democratic process - there is a real need to cut through red-tape, but putting a Bill through Parliament to excsise redundant laws takes too long. This is, surprise surprise, a lie. Departments are too slow in identifying such laws, and too slow in drafting replacements. What is more, the Government is generally not very good at drafting its Bills - as a certain Iraq protestor can testify.
The measure is unconstitutional and should be stopped. The Government pays lip-service to a need to tackle voter apathy, but voters are currently more impotent than they have been for thirty years - why vote when it makes no difference? When ministers start calling the shots irrespective of the will of the House then democracy ends.
It will further undermine the democratic process for the introduction of new Bills. Say, just to pluck an example out of the air, Charles Clarke concedes that the ID scheme will only move from its present form of creeping compulsion to one more compulsion on the introduction of a separate Bill. He will remove the particular piece of enabling legislation in the Bill. With the Bill in place, and the Home Office unsurprisingly fails to meet its 80% take-up by 2012 goal, there is nothing to stop Mr Clarke, or whoever is filling his chair by that point, saying "well there's clearly a case for enforced registration because we're currently spending stupid amounts of money and not getting any of those many benefits back" and just revising the Bill accordingly. Thus, with the L&RRB on the cards, there can be no further concessions...
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 3:32 pm
1 Comments:
We have put together a list of questions that we are asking everyone to send to their MPs.
http://rightlinks.co.uk/linked/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=6
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