I came across an interesting article from the Times.....



The Times                February 15, 2006



How I woke up to a nightmare plot to steal centuries of law and liberty by 

Daniel Finkelstein



THE POINT IS, I don’t want to seem like a nutter. It’s a very common human 

emotion, that — not wanting to stand out for thinking something hardly 

anyone else thinks. Best keep your head down and say nothing. In 1978, in 

Jonestown, Guyana, more than 900 people voluntarily drank 

strawberry-coloured poison and died, each one following his neighbour, 

eager not to refuse the drink and have his neighbour think that he was a 

nutter. Perhaps the worst part of the tragedy is that the rest of us look 

back at them and think — what a bunch of nutters.



So I’m nervous about admitting that I’ve been having a paranoid nightmare, 

one that very few other people seem to share. But I have been, so you may 

as well know about it.



In my nightmare, Tony Blair finally decides that he is fed-up with putting 

Bills before Parliament. He has so much to do and so little time. Don’t 

you realise how busy he is? He’s had enough of close shaves and of having 

to cut short trips abroad. He decides to put a Bill to End All Bills 

before the Commons, one that gives him and his ministers power to 

introduce and amend any legislation in future without going through all 

those boring stages in Parliament.



That’s not the end of my feverish fantasy. The new law is proposed and 

hardly anyone notices. John Redwood complains, of course, and a couple of 

Liberal Democrats, but by and large it is ignored. The Labour rebels are 

nowhere to be seen. The business lobby announces that it is about time all 

those politicians streamlined things, cutting out time-wasting debates. In 

a half empty Commons chamber, a junior minister puts down any objections 

with a few partisan wisecracks. Then the Bill to End All Bills is nodded 

through the Houses of Parliament, taking with it a few hundred years of 

Parliamentary democracy.



I wake up, sweating.



Only one thing persuades me that I’m not cracking up. When I have my 

nightmares about the Bill to End All Bills, I am not dreaming about 

dastardly legislation that I fear a cartoon Tony Blair, with an evil 

cackle, will introduce in some terrible future. I am tossing and turning 

about a government Bill that was given its second reading in the House of 

Commons last week and is heading into committee.



Now I know what I am about to tell you is difficult to believe (Why isn’t 

this on the front pages? Where’s the big political row?) but I promise you 

that it is true. The extraordinary Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, 

currently before the House, gives ministers power to amend, repeal or 

replace any legislation simply by making an order and without having to 

bring a Bill before Parliament. The House of Lords Constitution Committee 

says the Bill is “of first-class constitutional significance” and fears 

that it could “markedly alter the respective and long standing roles of 

minister and Parliament in the legislative process”.



There are a few restrictions — orders can’t be used to introduce new 

taxes, for instance — but most of the limitations on their use are fuzzy 

and subjective. One of the “safeguards” in the Bill is that an order can 

impose a burden only “proportionate to the benefit expected to be gained”. 

And who gets to judge whether it is proportionate? Why, the minister of 

course. The early signs are not good. Having undertaken initially not to 

use orders for controversial laws, the Government has already started 

talking about abstaining from their use when the matter at hand is 

“highly” controversial.



Now, I am not an extreme libertarian. I don’t spend my weekends in 

conferences discussing the abolition of traffic lights and the 

privatisation of MI5. But I have to admit that the legislation being 

debated in the Commons this week — the new ID cards, the smoking ban, the 

measure on the glorification of terror — has tempted me to take up smoking 

and start attending lectures about Hayek organised by earnest men with 

pamphlets in carrier bags.



Yet the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has made me realise that I 

may be missing the point — the biggest danger to civil liberties posed by 

these new laws is not the nature of them, but merely their quantity.



Let me explain my thinking.



The Government claims that it has no malign intention in introducing the 

reform to parliamentary procedures. It is just that it has such ambitious 

plans for deregulation — or “better regulation” as it rather suspiciously 

calls it — that Parliament won’t be able to cope. The previous Regulatory 

Reform Act, passed in 2001, was so hedged around with conditions and 

safeguards that it took longer to produce a regulatory reform order than 

it did to produce a Bill. So this time, the Government wants more sweeping 

powers.



During future detailed Commons consideration of the Bill, restrictions on 

the terms of the new orders will be resisted using the argument that 

business wants deregulation and government has to get on with it.



What does this argument, used often by the minister during last week’s 

debate, amount to? An admission that we are now passing so many new laws, 

so quickly, and so many of them are sloppy, that we don’t have time to 

debate them properly or reform them when they go wrong. Parliament is 

drowning in a sea of legislation. Instead of calling a halt to this, the 

Government is seeking a way of moving ever faster, adding yet more laws, 

this time with even less debate.



The problem with ID cards, smoking bans and new terror laws is not just 

the standard liberal one. It isn’t even that they are entirely 

unnecessary, since you can fashion an argument for each measure. It is 

that we should be reforming and enforcing the laws we have, rather than 

adding new complicated, poorly thought through laws to the stack that 

already exists. 

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill isn’t just a dangerous 

proposal. 

It is a flashing red light.



Our legislative activism is endangering our parliamentary democracy and we 

must stop before it’s too late.



Or am I a nutter?



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