Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act

My take on this is now up at the Magna Carta Plus weblog.

Some news items

Here's a brief roundup to help catch up on recent developments in various areas:

• The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is now The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006. I'll comment on this later at Magna Carta Plus, for now here is the response and discussion from some other campaigners against this bill.
  
• An e-petitions web page has been set up at the Prime Minister's web site, and one of the petitions subsequently created is an anti-ID cards petition, which has had thousands of signatures so far. These petitions will apparently be sent to the PM, once completed, and a response given to them.
  
• The Liberal Democrats are asking for nominations for legislation to be repealed in a "Freedom Bill", and have identified 10 pieces of legislation they think should be repealed, including the Identity Cards Act and the legislation that introduced control orders.
  

Anyway that's all for now.

New look

I've chosen a new look for the blog, in order to take advantage of some new features in Blogger. Unfortunately choosing a new template has meant losing some of the things from the old template, although only until I get round to pasting them in from my backup copy of that template.

However, one of the things I'd like to do is switch to using Blogger's own commenting system rather than the Haloscan provided comments I used to use, which predated Blogger's comments and were the only means of providing for comments that I originally had. I think this will probably mean losing the Haloscan comments however, but then there were only a few comments contained there. If anyone reading this can indicate a way of getting Blogger to display the old comments only in old articles and new comments only in new articles, I'd be most interested.

The Islamophobia Awards -- my alternative nominations

The Islamic Human Rights Commission organises the annual Islamphobia Awards, and have revealed the nominations for this year's awards. It seems to me though that the following people have done more to stoke up Islamophobia than many of the nominations listed there:

• The organisers and participants of this rally responding to the publications of cartoons of Mohammed outside Regents Park Mosque in February, which called for the beheading of those who insult Islam, threatened Europe with a real Holocaust and included the chant "Denmark, USA, 7/7/ on its way".
• The rioters who torched embassies in response to the Danish cartoons.
  
• The people who issued death threats against the cartoonists and who placed bounties on the cartoonists' heads.
• The people issuing death threats against Robert Redeker, driving him into hiding, after he wrote a column critical is Islam for the French newspaper "La Figaro".
• Anjem Choudary who called for the Pope (and indeed anyone who "insulted Islam") to be executed, after one of the Pope's speeches was deemed to have insulted Islam, for its use of this quotation from a Byzantine Emperor: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". Note that the Pope did not endorse this view of Mohammed in his speech, rather he used the quotation to kick off a discussion about violence and religion.
  

Surely, by conforming to the stereotype of the angry intolerant Muslim, who will threaten, if not carry out, acts of violence over any perceived insult to their religion, these people have been stoking up Islamophobia far more effectively than e.g. Jack Straw asking Muslim women to remove their veils or the Pope using an ancient quotation during a speech?

Renew for Freedom

With the passing of the Identity Cards Act 2006, the law enabling the creation of the national identity register (NIR) and accompanying ID card in Britain, No2ID has launched its Renew for Freedom campaign.

The idea is to get as many people as possible to renew their passports during the month of May (i.e. this month!). Those that do so will end up with a passport valid for 10 years and will do so before the point at which renewing passports will entail registering on the NIR.

The government has so far indicated that, from 2008 onwards, passport renewals will entail registering on the NIR and getting a card (though the card, but only the card, can be opted out of until 2010). They are keen to get as many people onto the system as possible. Clearly if the scheme is to be scrapped, it will help to ensure that as many people as possible refuse to register. If the numbers are large enough it will make compelling people to get a card unviable.

Renewing your passport now will therefore enable you to hold out against having to register on the NIR for longer than it would otherwise. Also, renewing now minimises the risk of being compelled to register on the NIR should the government move the timetable forward.

Tory peers cave in and let the Identity Cards Bill become an Act

Tory peers have accepted an amendment to the Identity Cards Bill allowing people renewing passports to opt out of getting an ID card until 2010. However they still have to register on the system, which means this "compromise" is nothing of the sort. So much for the Tory party defending civil liberties.

More details here.

Why the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is worse than the Civil Contingencies Act

I've posted this article on Magna Carta Plus as well as here. It follows up on my earlier article on the government's new enabling bill.

In my earlier coverage of the Abolition of Parliament Legislative and Regulatory Reform(LRR) Bill, I think I have underestimated how much power it gives to government ministers. I now think this bill actually gives more power to government ministers, in practical terms, than the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA).

The CCA explicitly gives Ministers both the powers of legislating via an Act of Parliament and the powers of the Royal Prerogative. However those powers are supposed to be invoked only in an emergency, are time limited to 7 days, albeit renewable, and have various other constraints such as not modifying the CCA itself or the Human Rights Act. There are protections for the courts and criminal offences created under CCA regulations can carry only 3 months imprisonment.

The possibility that the LRR is worse than the CCA was pointed out to me when discussing the bill in this thread on the usenet group, uk.politics.misc. One poster makes the following points:

• The LRR is designed ostensibly to be used in the normal course of governing, where the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) is supposed to be used only in emergencies.
• The LRR can amend any legislation, where the CCA cannot be used to alter the CCA itself or the Human Rights Act.
• The LRR can be used to delegate legislative power, without apparent limit, to anybody the specified in an appropriate order.
• The LRR can be used to alter or abolish any rule of law.

The key matter I hadn’t considered fully before is this. The orders under the LRR can be used to confer legislative power on Ministers, such that they would then be able to legislate without any reference to Parliament at all. Given the government’s ability to control Parliamentary procedure (e.g. to ensure the negative resolution procedure is used), it would be possible for such a transfer of power in the favour of Ministers to occur without any vote in Parliament occurring!

This transfer could be achieved by sneaking the measure into a suitably large and convoluted order that implements a policy strongly backed by the governing party, and hoping it will either not be noticed due to the lack of time for scrutinising the order (this lack of time being arranged by the government) or if it is noticed it will be allowed through because the governing party’s MPs and Peers do not wish to abandon a key policy.

Remember there is no possibility for making amendments that would allow MPs or Peers to selectively modify problematic areas of the parliamentary orders. At best a request to revise the order can be made to the government which the government can consider and reject, or for that matter implement in any way it pleases. The Ministers will be in control at every step unless MPs or Peers vote the order down in its entirety.

I thus fear that if this bill passes we will not only see increasing amounts of legislation passed via parliamentary order with little or no scrutiny, but we will see Ministers being given increasing powers to legislate directly without reference to Parliament. The bill really should be entitled the Abolition of Parliament bill. The Abolition of Parliamentary Scrutiny Bill moniker I’ve been using in some posts is thus too mild a description of the threat this bill makes to Parliament’s role.