Legislative & Regulatory Reform

Not only is that quite a mouthful but it sounds really dull doesn’t it? Did images of old men in legal wiggery shuffling about parliament clutching mountains of dusty old parchment cross your mind for a moment? That was my reaction when I first heard about this new piece of legislation but all is not quite as it may seem within the Palace of Westminster these days.

This bill was first mentioned in the Queen’s speech of May 2005 as the Regulatory Reform Bill and was proposed to slash unnecessary red tape, with the aim of cutting the backlog of what the CBI has called “damaging regulation” that is holding business and enterprise back.

“The malignant spread of red tape and regulation must be addressed as a matter of the utmost urgency,” said a spokesman for the Forum of Private Business (FPB).

That all sounds very good doesn’t it? However since the initial proposal the bill has been somewhat transformed into something a little more sinister because it now grants new powers to individual ministers enabling them to modify or pass legislation by simply issuing an “Order” without the full examination and parliamentary process. The only limiting factors are :

• They cannot impose new taxes.
• They cannot create new criminal offences with a sentence exceeding two years.
• They cannot authorise forced entry, seizure or compel the disclosure of evidence.

No law is exempted.

Here is the full details of The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Here is the Wikipedia Entry for the Bill.

Here is a good summary of the ramifications and legal details.

Here is a Campaign Website : Save Parliament.

A lot of bloggers have got quite excited about this, some have compared it to Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933 and dubbed it the Abolition of Parliament Bill, but I think they are exaggerating the issue somewhat (Nazi analogies are horribly overused these days). I would say this is more comparable with Henry VIII’s control of Parliament as it gives them considerable expedient empowerment but falls somewhat short of dictatorship, but it is nevertheless quite worrying particularly in the light of the flurry of new, restrictive and ill-conceived legislation which has been making its way through Parliament since the last election and I have been worrying about what this is all supposed to achieve exactly. It almost seems that the government is quietly preparing and posturing for extreme civil unrest, dissent or even war.