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UK Gov't Launches 'Your Freedom' Website To Seek Laws Worth Repealing
Firefalcon writes "The UK Government launched Thursday the 'Your Freedom' website, headed by the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, to 'identify laws that should be repealed.' In a recent tweet, Police State UK pointed out an article in the New Statesman which appeals for people to call on the Government to repeal the ill thought-out Digital Economy Act that was rushed through Parliament without sufficient scrutiny. While part of the Act is regarding the digital TV switchover, other sections allow for users to be restricted or disconnected from the Internet at the behest of copyright owners, which goes against the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' that has been in place since the Magna Carta."
Damm, that rocks. Can we have some?
This is what can happen in the rest of the civilised world if you vote for the third party.
Imposing a word limit would force them to remove exceptions, such as self-defense (murder) and fair use (copyright). And do you really want statutes to resemble twitter posts?
Prohibiting abbreviations would make some parts of the law quite painful to read as well, and would also be ineffective as the norm is to use a simple, 1 word term (e.g. officer) and then define its meaning at the beginning of the act (e.g. police officer or member of law enforcement, or as defined by the Police Powers Act 1900)
Your idea of condensing all legislation down into a single book is incredibly naive. Law has many similarities to programming - can you imagine the issues associated with limiting the no. of lines of code that a program's source may consist of, while still requiring the same functionality? Comments would be the first thing to go, and the equivalent of comments in legislation are extremely important to their interpretation. Similarly, even if all legislation were compressed down to a single book, this book would:
a) be incomplete, as in any common law system precedent (i.e. past court cases) are of equal importance to legislation, and
b) be incomprehensible - the average person is as capable of understanding laws as they are of understanding C++, and because of the nature of the content involved they will not be able to do so without education on how to do so. Even when written in plain English, there are many legal tools that define how phrases are to be interpreted. e.g. Ejusdem generis
Trying to limit the quantity of legislation is a poor way to go about your aim, which I presume is to restrict the power of the government. A far better way to do this is to explicitly limit what the government can legislate on. For example:
51 Legislative powers of the Parliament ...
The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to
make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the
Commonwealth with respect to:
(i) trade and commerce with other countries
-s51 of the Australian Constitution
In our case though this is of little significance practically as the states have unlimited legislative power (i.e. they can make laws about whatever they want).
Ultimately, the best way to keep stupid laws of the books is to keep stupid politicians out of parliament. This is largely dependent on keeping stupid people from voting, and consequently rather difficult to achieve.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
OK, sure. Now are you going to the job they did or are you "too proud" and will just keep claiming benefits instead?
Summation 2