What a load of Bills!

The Queen’s Speech? A curates egg laid by an ostrich and within a week it is showing signs of being scrambled. There are twenty-one proposed new laws.

What a load of Bills!

When it looked as though the wretched Human Rights Act, the sanctuary of terrorists, illegal immigrants and crooks, was first up on the agenda, with Cameron’s Rottweiler in charge of its defenestration, it must have been doubles all round. Now it’s being kicked into the long grass and Dave has Gove and May at his throat.

The pretext is that the two rebels want to abrogate the European Convention on Human Rights. This makes little sense. The Convention (largely drafted by the UK) has been around since 1951. The problem lies with the Human Rights Act which gave the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction over the UK which it never had before. Until then, its judgements were merely persuasive. British judges could take them or leave them.

The ECHR has aggressively expanded its concept of jurisdiction. It is scarcely ever out of the media, with dotty judgments such as that that enabled a criminal to escape deportation because of his human right to a ‘family life’; he owned a cat.

The President of the Court has never held a judicial post previously. Other judges come from such upholders of human rights as Azerbaijan and the hopelessly corrupt Ukraine where courts will rule in favour of whichever litigant pays the largest bribe.

So what’s the problem? Why not simply revert to the status quo ante? The objective is to get rid of the ECHR, and restore the primacy of the British courts to the pre-1998 position. Proposing to abrogate the European Convention would then bring the EU into play (members are expected to be signatories to the Convention). That would be the kiss of death.

Then we have the Psychoactive Substances Bill: the DT gave this a good rubbishing for an absurdly-drafted piece of nonsense that could criminalize perfume, hop pillows, tea or any substance that has the effect of giving pleasure. So now you know: pleasure is out under this ‘Conservative’ government. Much more sinister is that it looks as though the burden of proof will be the balance of probabilities, not ‘beyond reasonable’ doubt.

But modern Tories have never been very big on civil liberties.  They have done nothing to rid the statute book of the 3,500 new offences created by Blair which criminalises us all, neither will they, even without the encumbrance of the LibDems.

No doubt there will be cheers from the ‘right’ about the new Immigration Bill                                                                                                      that  belatedly allows  ‘deport first, appeal later’ in all immigration cases. But it also allows the police to purloin the wages of anyone working without the right papers.

Cameron intends to honour his pre-election bribe to double free child care for three- and four-year-olds. This is estimated to cost £25 billion. There is no word as to where the money is coming from. The foreign aid budget could contribute about half that sum, but a further raid on the defence budget is more likely.

The Full Employment and Welfare Bill will lower the benefit ‘cap’ to £23,000. With the minimum wage at about £16.000 this does not appear to be a convincing ‘back to work’ incentive.

The Extremism Bill will make OFCOM the censor of TV and radio broadcasts

There is, of course, the Referendum Bill. The ballot paper will be biased towards ‘Yes’, the full weight of the Establishment will be put behind it, and Cameron will present the cosmetic gloss of his ‘reforms’ as a victory over Brussels, so Britain will vote for no change on the principle ‘Always keep a hold of  nurse, for fear of getting something worse’.

It’s not all bad.

Strikes will require a majority in favour by 40% of the membership instead of 40% of members voting. The unions can be relied upon to help push through the Trade Unions Bill by staging a few public sector strikes in the run-up.

The police will no longer be able to hold a person on bail without charge for years; they will be limited to 28 days in the first instance and only the courts will be able to extend this beyond three months.

And finally, the Government proposes to answer the West Lothian question.

Now that should prove really fascinating since it is actually unanswerable.

 We live in interesting times!