Return of the Bill of Rights
It was perhaps inevitable but the return of Dominic Raab to the Ministry of Justice means a return for his ill-fated Bill of Rights.
Raab has announced that he hopes the Bill will return to Parliament for scrutiny within the coming weeks, so what right is he most focused on? Perhaps Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has sparked an interest in protecting free speech. Or the cost of living crisis means the Deputy PM wants to ensure that British people can heat their homes and feed their children.
No, instead the Bill will apparently be designed to help fight the growing number of migrant boat crossings across the Channel even though it is not clear exactly what right that invokes.
That is because the Bill has never been interested in rights. Not really.
Instead it is about fighting a supposed culture war and appealing to the base instincts of the Conservative Party. That is why when the Bill was first published earlier this year, a focus was on interim measures of the European Court of Human Rights because of the recent decision from that court about government plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
This proposed legislation is not about giving people more rights or even altering the constitutional landscape of the UK. It is about the government centralising power around Whitehall, a trend that has increased at a rapid rate since Brexit.
For those interested in the details, I have written previously about the Bill here but it seems unlikely that it will make it through Parliament in its current form. The Lords are likely to have a lot to say about the stark inadequacies of the legislation and that will force some concessions from Raab. The interaction with the current human rights regime in the UK will also be a cause for concern and scrutiny.
Given that a general election will also have to be called at some point in the next couple of years, opponents will be hoping the Bill gets stuck in purgatory and not make it to enactment. If it does get passed then it will certainly not be a historic day for rights and the culture of liberal democracy in Britain. At best, it will simply not achieve its stated goals but at worst it will undermine the legal rights of citizens in the UK for years to come.
This week in the podcast I also talk briefly about the continued centralisation of power in the context of a case about VAT. Part of the legal argument was around the EU principle of effectiveness and since Brexit this has pretty much dissipated. Now that there is no real requirement for laws to be enforceable it leaves individual in a much weaker position than they were in before.
Episode link: https://uklawweekly.com/2022-uksc-28/
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Marcus