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The Law of Unintended Consequences – politicalbetting.com
The Law of Unintended Consequences – politicalbetting.com
Our Parliament is filled with new MPs with little or no experience of how to legislate. Or experience of the consequences of getting new laws wrong. There is, however, one law they need to understand above all….
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Just imagine a Commons made up of 650 lawyers.
Heaven on Earth.
That has never happened to me at work.
Next thing you’ll be telling me you aren’t both billing me for reading your posts.
Final post on the free speech subject from me - the reason I know the new laws will end up being a disaster is the same reason the hate speech laws have ended up being a disaster. The police are incentivised to chase arrests and conviction stats not to solve actual crime. That means a new law which allows them to log a lot of arrests and boost their stats, pushing speech that might be perceived as potentially harmful into criminal justice system will result in people getting arrested and convicted with these weak "crimes" because individual police officers will chase their stats to earn promotions and pay rises.
So whatever the drafting intends, whatever the the spirit of the law might intend, the end result will be police officers chasing easy arrests and convictions for things people write on the internet and to avoid being arrested people like OGH and other people who run small time forums/blogs/comment sections in the UK will close up shop or only allow the most milquetoast of commentary.
“Lawyers!” exclaimed Peter, “What is the use of so many? I have only two in my whole empire, and I mean to hang one of them as soon as I return.”
The very worst kind laws are those that hand over huge chunks of definition of what the law actually means to regulatory bodies. Who can then define what it means free of any oversight or constraint.
Out of interest, is it a potential infringement of the Online Safety Act to forbid discussion of things? Could someone argue that they have been harmed by having perfectly reasonable content they posted removed or that they were harmed because they were denied access to this perfectly reasonable content?
The Americans have powers that are about as separate as practicable, and their legislation is just as poorly drafted and loophole-ridden as ours.
A lot of the problem isn't so much the scrutiny, though obviously that's important - it's the extremely poor early drafts written in government departments. In neither the UK nor the US do the best law students go into government work - when you can earn four times as much at a white shoe law firm or in house in an investment bank, why would you? And those few that do are mostly just using it to build their contact lists for later employment as lobbyists or in house. So government lawyers do, with honourable exceptions, tend to be the dregs of the profession.
At least that was my experience from my time in government.
My suggestion is to get MPs to specialise. So cabinet ministers need 3 years experience as junior minister/shadow/select committee before they can serve. Get 30 MPs really understanding health, another 30 on justice, another 30 defence etc.
The position adopted by the medics was that any proactive care was likely to be intrusive and very unlikely to produce results. She was on oxygen and on New Years Day the family agreed to that being withdrawn. We were told she was then likely to "pass" (the word die is strenuously avoided) "within minutes". She had been given a substantial portion of morphine to ease her passage.
7 days later, around 4am yesterday, she did indeed die. In that 7 days she received medication to keep her "comfortable", that is unconscious. She received no fluids. It was extremely hard for all of us, particularly my wife and her granddaughters in attendance.
Trying to take a step back I believe that the medical advice was correct. I think that the doctors were correct to focus on her pre collapse "base line". There was no question that her quality of life had been deteriorating.
I was concerned that so little interest was shown when she seemed to be close to consciousness at times. The speed at which further painkillers were provided troubled me, particularly in the first ward (the second, a ward dealing with elderly patients, was much better). The fact is that an entirely healthy person would have met their demise using the form care she was provided with. Simplistically, she was dying of thirst and hunger. This happened because our medical staff are terrified of being seen to "cause" the death. It was traumatic. I only hope she had no awareness of it although there was some response at times to hymns and classical music that visitors played for her.
This seemed to me to be the worst of all worlds not only for the dying but also for the living. It would be a scenario that the bill would have absolutely no relevance to and it may be thought to make the bill redundant and pointless given that our doctors can facilitate (if not "cause") death so easily. We need to be a lot less coy about accepting that humans sometimes need to be put to sleep for exactly the same reasons as animals that we also care for. I accept that. But the current Bill is simply not the answer.
Be interesting to see the details behind this and why the charge has come about.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/uk-athletics-and-its-former-head-of-sport-charged-over-paralympian-s-death/ar-AA1xbfkR?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=1b2d921807534588afe09695595bd2a1&ei=19
Interesting exchange in Holyrood, with some unusual questions from Craig Hoy. Have to read between the lines what has been going on.
https://x.com/markthehibby/status/1877000324965122104
What I would say, though, is that our traditional principles-based tax legislation is a whole lot better than the highly prescriptive approach to tax law taken by the Americans (whose code makes ours look like a short pamphlet), or the ridiculous lengths that some go to - notably the Australians - to stuff their guidance with as many examples as possible of things they don't like. Most new UK tax law, while not perfect, is reasonable by international standards.
But also- are we expecting laws to do something that can't be done? The ideal is to perfectly demarcate acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and that's just not possible. No, I don't know what we do about that.
The labour cabinet has Lammy, Starmer, Mahmood as lawyers, possibly others.
I'm not sure we need more tbh.
I did draft a statutory instrument about the use of PCB's on the hulls of boats - to stop their use as they damage sea life. But however useless government lawyers may be, they are not the ones drafting legislation - that is down to Parliamentary Counsel - and it is quite a skill. The reason the laws are so poor is because (a) of poor confused vague instructions from Ministers and (b) a failure to think through the implications, as well as a lack of effective scrutiny.
Imagine 650!
vf.politicalbetting.com And has a far better chance of getting away with it too !!!
"How can things be improved? You may have heard about “Citizen Scientists” who are being recruited to help scientists analyse the huge amounts of information being gathered by recent advances in the technology employed. So, can “citizen legal advisers” be employed from the ranks of the U3A to help draft and propose improvements to legislation? While some knowledge of legal matters would be required in the team, there is a great need for some people to review legislation and comment along the lines of “I don’t understand this – it needs to be rewritten in a way that lay people can understand”.
Have a look at u3acommunities.org; improving legislation.
"Which brings us to #3: increases in long-term rates, like the 10-year Treasury rate, might reflect the horrible, creeping suspicion that Donald Trump actually believes the crazy things he says about economic policy and will act on those beliefs."
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-there-an-insanity-premium-on-interest?r=fysdp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Instead of assuming that there is a problem, that this problem is so serious that it requires a new law and that this law is the right one, we ask -
1. What exactly is the problem this law is intended to solve?
2. Is it really the case that the problem - clearly defined - cannot be addressed by existing laws or other measures?
3. Is the problem sufficiently serious to warrant change?
Some problems are ones which cannot easily be solved or at all or are inherent in the tensions between conflicting interests. A bit of realism to counter the “There should be a law against it.” tendency in voters and politicians is needed.
4. Will legal change resolve or alleviate the problem? Will it create other problems instead? Is what is proposed a proportionate way of resolving or mitigating the problem?
5. What are the consequences, especially the unintended ones? Do they harm the interests of others? Or other important requirements? It is essential to assess the disadvantages and the harms done. If so, how bad are these? Can these be easily mitigated? If not, is it really worth going ahead or are there another measures which might work better?
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responds to Trump on his proposal to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico — and points to a 17th century map of greater México.
“We are going to call it América Mexicana. It sounds pretty, no?”
Would the Labour Party be facing legal action for the video they posted on tiktok containing a song with 'questionable' lyrics?
As described here - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/02/battleaxe-alan-bennett-matriarch-extinction
Well except the internet is always going to be a bit of a 18 rated place as it doesn't revolve around the UK, so we end up with the ludicrous spectacle of senior police officers calling for extradition of US citizens because they've been a bit spicy with their tweets.
Australia's approach is better imv.
Possibly back in the 'nineties, or a bit more recently.
But I think this most unfair - I don't turn 50 for another 10 months!
I'd add one other point, which is the increasing use of 'not illegal but you can't do it anyway, or if you do, we'll record it and you'll be screwed' type regulation. As with the non-crime hate incidents noted above.
First develop a proposal, amend with use cases specifying what should happen in each case. Both the proposal being written in plain english. When mps are satisfied they have covered enough examples pass it to the civil service to turn into the legalese.
This way at least all non lawyer mp's will understand it and what is being passed as will the general population. It will make the whole process of legislation more transparent. Also the use cases developed can be used for guidance in court.
It's a monster piece of legislation with 119 references to harmful (almost all of which are in the context of harmfulness to children) and 196 references to harm, which I really don't want to plod through as well.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/hags/victoria-smith/9780349726984
Otherwise I'll have a pint of whatever you are drinking.
The legislation does not seem to be laser-focused on that level of seriousness of harm.
A hint of the stiff upper lip, but also combined with something distinctively female, which is nowadays not an idea that is sufficiently credited, or also out of fashion.
Margaret Rutherford was wonderful , as some of these characters.
The truth is the bill is about one thing and why we see it's like in many countries. Prior to social media publishing was a one to many thing and governments could control what people had information on. The internet ruined that for them and ever since they have been seeking a way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Of course the internet like everything powerful is a two edged sword and along with more information comes more misinformation. However we always had that too from the main stream press
What about anti terror legislation used to seize Icelandic bank assets after they collapsed ?
https://x.com/trump_repost/status/1877033120463233070
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn't work!), but didn't care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
That also relates to the trans debate, I would say , too.
But the above statement by Trump is bullshit.