Slashdot Mirror
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Thursday the 'Your Freedom' website, headed by the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, to 'identify laws that should be repealed.'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?
I am writing this from within the maximum security wing of the New British National Defence Forces detention island.
I was absolutely delighted to share all of my views about laws I felt needed repealing in the UK. My IP address was in no way used to trace my identity and when my new friends from the NBNDF came to talk to me I felt I was completely fulfilled by their probing and vigorous questions.
I have not been added to any lists of registered subversives.
My stay at the security wing has been fulfilling. I feel refreshed, invigorated and entirely supportive of the NBNDF. No electro-pain equipment was used upon me at all during this week.
Signed,
Mr Bottles.
How about an automatic sunset: a law that has 50%+1 support gets to live 5 years before it has to be passed again. A law that has 100% support gets to live 10 years before it has to be passed again. Scale linearly between the two to give some incentive to make popular laws, not just squeakers. If that would cause an overload at "pass-again day", add +/- 5% of the duration to the time until it has to be passed again so that the exact day will be sufficiently randomized.
Hm. There's gotta be a way to discourage politicians from making new laws.
I've heard it suggested that every law should automatically expire after a fixed period, such as one year or five years. Not only would the legislature be kept busy with votes for the laws that obviously should be kept ("Uh oh, armed robbery is going to become legalized on Wednesday..."), but it would limit the damage from laws that spend frivolously, are poorly thought out, or are motivated by special interests. At worst, lobbyists would have influence legislators over and over again to reap the benefits of a law that favors them.
Not saying it's the best idea, but it's definitely an interesting one, and I feel strongly that we need a way to get laws that were, say, meant to help bring electricity to rural areas 80 years ago off the books.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
This is what can happen in the rest of the civilised world if you vote for the third party.
when i saw that when cameron moved into number 10, he only had a simple bed, 1-2 ikea brand stools and whatnot. i said to myself, well, someone who is living that simple has to have some good qualities at least.
...
immediately thereafter he apologized to irish for the bloody sunday. then, he come up proposing that queen's funds should be frozen. (11 mil or so a year). now, his partner clegg comes up with this.
it is sorry time for elite bloodsuckers in britain
Read radical news here
They are actually moderating now, marking duplicates, removing real nonsense (suggestions to repeal a law that doesn't exist) etc. They didn't on Day 1 because of the volume of traffic.
Unfortunately, that still allows a lot of idiocy to be on display.
But there is also plenty of good highlighting of idiotic laws and regs. Have a read - you might enjoy it.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
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
The cost of that still becomes prohibative over a long period.
How about this: after a law is passed it expires 5 years later.
If it is re-passed it takes 10 years to expire.
If after 10 more years it gets passed again then it lasts 20 years.
then 40
etc etc
that way laws like "no stabbing people" wouldn't have to be reviewed too often.
Laws which often fail would have to be reviewed a lot(as they should since that would imply they're not popular).