Source: Daily Mail
For British businesses wilting beneath the weight of red tape, it sounds just the ticket.

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill gives Ministers the power to dump burdensome laws without going through normal parliamentary procedures.

With regulation costing business £40billion a year, few would argue that drastic action is not long overdue.

Yet this dry as dust, apparently benign, measure is not what it seems.

For one thing, most red tape now emanates from Brussels and will not be affected by the legislation.

More pertinently, it hands almost unfettered power to Ministers. Without any recourse to Parliament they will, for example, be able to create new powers of arrest and sack judges.

Ken Clarke, who is leading the Tories' democracy review, warned that in theory it would allow the Government to override the five-year limit on a Parliamentary term.

For nearly nine years New Labour has behaved with autocratic arrogance, treated Parliament with contempt, politicised the civil service and emasculated the Second Chamber.

It chills the blood that this legislation gives them power to change laws at the stroke of a pen.

The Commons must have an absolute right of veto over any ministerial diktat - and that should be explicit in the Bill.


Tricky corners

Remember those innocent days when political sleaze meant a Tory politician who couldn't keep his trousers up?

Under "whiter than white" New Labour, sleaze has entered a different dimension.

Bernie Ecclestone's £1million bribe to help Formula 1, the Hinduja Brothers cash for passports, Lakshmi Mittal's cash for steel, Geoffrey Robinson's secret loan to Peter Mandelson, honours purchased for cash - big money for big favours has been Labour's modus operandi.

Now comes another intriguing tale of alleged bribery and corruption.

Tessa Jowell's husband David Mills is being investigated for receiving a £355,000 payment after he had, in his own words, "turned some very tricky corners" during a bribery trial to keep Silvio Berlusconi "out of a great deal of trouble I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew".

Mr Mills was for years Mr Berlusconi's adviser on tax avoidance and one can only guess what he's kept under his hat.

As we reveal today this couple have been dogged by controversy for years.

We are sure no impropriety attaches to Miss Jowell but as this saga gets smellier by the day, it would be comforting if she could give the Commons her assurance that she has absolutely no involvement in her husband's deeply unedifying activities.


Shameful flights

Tony Blair sounded affronted when questioned in the Commons about CIA "rendition flights" before Christmas, telling his questioner: "I don't know what you're referring to".

His memory might be jogged by yesterday's confirmation that no fewer than 200 such flights have crossed this country. It's inconceivable he was not aware of them.

Meanwhile, we learn that nearly 100 of the terror suspects detained without charge by the Americans, some of them possibly transported on these sinister flights, have been killed in custody.

If true, this is a shameful stain on the US Meanwhile, the growing questions over Britain's complicity in America's torture - sorry, extraordinary rendition - grow more disturbing by the day.



How we move ever closer to becoming a totalitarian state

The Prime Minister claims to be defending liberty but a barely noticed Bill will rip the heart out of parliamentary democracy

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is hardly an aerodynamic title; it doesn't fly from the lips. People have difficulty remembering the order of the words and what exactly will be the effect of this apparently dull piece of lawmaking.
But in the dusty cradle of Committee A, a monster has been stirring and will, in due course, take flight to join the other measures in the government's attack on parliamentary democracy and the rights of the people. The 'reform' in the title allows ministers to make laws without the scrutiny of parliament and, in some cases, to delegate that power to unelected officials. In every word, dot and comma, it bears the imprint of New Labour's authoritarian paternity.

Like all Labour's anti-libertarian bills, it appears in relatively innocuous guise. The bill was presented last year as a way of improving a previous Labour act and is purportedly designed to remove some of the burden of regulation that weighs on British business and costs billions of pounds every year. Labour says it will enable ministers to cut regulation without needing to refer to parliament and so simplify and speed things up.
The reality is that the beneficiaries of this bill will not be industry and business, but ministers and the executive, who will enjoy a huge increase in their unscrutinised power. As with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which was presented as modernising local and national emergency measures but which went much further to give ministers arbitrary powers, this bill takes another chunk out of our centuries- old democracy.

The really frightening thing about last week's proceedings is that there were just two journalists watching as the minister piloting the legislation, Jim Murphy, refused to debate constitutional implications. Instead, he intoned replies drafted in advance by himself and, presumably, his civil servants. Disgracefully, he dismissed as 'debating points' considered objections from Tories Christopher Chope and Oliver Heald and Liberal Democrats David Heath and David Howarth. All raised the Kafkaesque possibility that this bill was so demonically drafted that an unscrupulous government could use it to modify the bill itself and so extend its powers even further.

Watching, I reflected that this was truly how democracy is extinguished. Not with guns and bombs, but from the inside by officials and politicians who deceive with guile and who no longer pretend to countenance the higher interests of the constitution.

The 'debating points' were rather more than that. They concern the powers that may be granted to ministers that could further damage the concept of habeas corpus, alter the law on Britain's relationship with the Commonwealth, on the relationship with the EU, on extradition, the appropriation of property and the criminal law. In theory, even the monarchy could be affected.

This is to say little about common law, the centuries of precedents and rulings which contain so many of the historic rights of British culture. 'Oh no,' said the minister, as if talking to a child, 'ministers will give assurances; they will confine themselves to the regulations that concern business.'

If that is the case, why does the bill not say so? Why is it drafted so loosely? Why is Jim Murphy doing so much to protect its versatility? Why won't he put the safeguards in the bill from the start? There can be only one answer: ministers want to bypass parliament and transfer authority to themselves and their officials under the cover of helping business.

Mr Murphy has let it be known that the government might concede powers for select committees to veto use of the fast-track process for issues they consider controversial. But it is worth remembering that membership of select committees is controlled by the whips and that the chairmen are generally biddable. We should also wonder why Mr Murphy has not already drafted this veto, if he genuinely wants to protect and reassure parliament.

The essential point, however, is that the individual decisions taken by ministers as a result of this new law will not be scrutinised in the chamber of the House of Commons.

Sometimes, I wonder if those of us worried about the attacks on British democracy by Tony Blair's government are getting things out of proportion or misunderstanding the Prime Minister's mission, as he described it in last week's Observer

I certainly understand that the capillaries of a society run from bottom to top, bearing all the bad news, intractable problems, mood swings and crises; that it is all ceaselessly pumped upwards in the direction of the Prime Minister; and that the view afforded in Downing Street must sometimes be truly extraordinary, a seething, organic, Hogarthian panorama of delinquency and unreason.

A Prime Minister must try to reach beyond the day-to-day business of government, frantic though it is, and make sense of what he sees below, seek the connecting threads, order up the policies and implement them so that improvement becomes possible. Few will disagree that this is the chief impulse of Tony Blair's premiership. As he told us long ago, he is a moderniser. Modernising is still the closest thing he has to a political ideology and it was significant how many times the words modern and modernity appeared in last week's article. At one point, he declared: 'For me, this is not an issue of liberty but of modernity', as if liberty and modernity were somehow at odds.

Because he is by his own account well-intentioned, he believes that nothing should get in the way of this modernising purpose, the exercise of his benevolent reason on the turbulent society below. Like Mrs Thatcher, he has become almost mystically responsible for the state of the nation. And like Mrs Thatcher, he finds that after a long period in Number 10, he is still surrounded by sluggishness and resistance. Public services are slow to reform; the judiciary obstructs ministerial action with footling concerns about individual rights; and parliament is agonisingly slow to produce the fast-acting laws he craves.

You can see why, as time runs out, he has the need to cut through it all to achieve the things that he so dearly believes are right for our society. That is the way a moderniser works, because it is the only measure of success.

Yet this addiction to the idea of modernity is also a kind of arrogance about the times we live in, a sense that no Prime Minister has ever faced the problems coming across his desk. It indicates a common condition in modernisers and modernists of all hues and that is an almost complete lack of a grounding in history. If Blair was more interested in British history, he would understand that the present, while certainly unique, is not uniquely awful.

But more important, he would see the great damage his laws are doing to the institutions we have inherited - to the constitution, to the tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, to the independence of the judiciary, to individual rights and to the delicate relationship between the individual and the state. All of them are products of British history. They are not perfect, but they make up a fairly large part of the body politic. This is who we are.

This rush of laws presented to parliament in disguise, with their hidden sleeper clauses, are a disaster for our democracy. They are changing our country rapidly and profoundly. What I saw in Committee A was the triumph of Tony Blair's modernity over liberty.



The Times February 15, 2006


How I woke up to a nightmare plot to steal centuries of law and liberty
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 unecessary, 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?