Did you know?And not a lot of people do.....
That on average, each day in Britain, Nanny passes eight new laws.
Sweet & Maxwell (the legal publishers) reported that Nanny introduced 14% more new laws during 2007 than in 2006, a total of 3,071 compared with 2,702 the year before.
That is eight new laws every day, compared with seven in 2006.
Many of the new laws introduced in 2007 were brought in as statutory instruments, which often receive less scrutiny than statutes.
Yet do these laws help or hinder us?
Of course they don't help us!
Labour, with its obsession for control and bureaucracy (not to mention its unhealthy connection and close links to the legal establishment), believes that all matters of our lives should be regulated by laws. When something is deemed to be not "quite right", Labour snaps its fingers and legislates.
Nanny forgets that there is most likely a perfectly good law, already on the statute books, for dealing with the perceived problem. However, that law is most likely not being properly applied.
Lazy and obsessive law making leads to dictatorship.
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It should also be noted that most of the new laws relate to offences that are of absolute liability. This means that there is no need to prove an intention or "guilty mind" to commit the offence.
ReplyDeleteMany are also offences that are only triable in a magistrate’s court (Summary offences) where the magistrate is little more than a rubber stamper of the crown's cases. Magistrates tend to accept the prosecution's version of events as true, because after all, Nanny would not lie.
Most of these offences also have a fine attached....Kerching....so they amount to little more than a revenue raising exercise.
When the law interferes in everyone’s lives or is used as an extra form of taxation or sets out to criminalise decent citizens, the law becomes an ass and the public stop supporting it.
Mind you, if you can make so many laws it is impossible for anyone to know them all, it would be easy for Nanny to arrest someone for breaking an obscure law or regulation and now hold them for six weeks without charge.
Another very important point to highlight is the strange relationship people have (particularly in this country) with rules and laws.
ReplyDeleteAll it takes is for some school leaver working for the council to decide it would be a nice idea to draw a white line up the centre of a footpath to segregate cyclists on one side from pedestrians on the other. Perhaps it is a nice idea but, for many, the moment that white line appears, it takes on an almost religious significance as if some kind of exalted judgement has been passed down from Moses on Mount Sinai.
We have an issue in our village at present to do with children and bicycles, and it’s obvious that if the council hadn’t erected a bloomin’ (excuse my language) needless sign about cycling in the first place then no-one would have noticed the bloomin’ children playing on their bloomin’ bikes and we’d all be livin’ in bloomin’ blissful harmony. The only plus note is that while the focus is on children and bicycles this week the motorists get a break.
As above, so below. The potential for mayhem also exists at central government level but is probably a few orders of magnitude greater than at local council level.
Rules / laws are best introduced only after very careful consideration and, in most cases, only as a last resort.
I have for some time been proposing a possible solution: with the exception of laws about murder, all laws should expire on their tenth anniversary (although actions already taken under those laws would not be obviated [no, you do not get released because a law about arson just expired]) unless re-passed as-is. This would, I think, keep Parliament (or Congress) busy enough to cut the number of entirely new laws from the thousands each year to a couple of hundred.
ReplyDelete"Statutory instruments"
ReplyDeleteMost of them will derive from the European Union.
Here in Southern CA we seem to be oozing nanny laws. I used think it was regional, and an out of state move would find us basking once again in lands of self-reliance. But alas, I am beginning to think a planetary move is in order.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post.