UK Gov't Launches 'Your Freedom' Website To Seek Laws Worth Repealing 332
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Thursday the 'Your Freedom' website, headed by the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, to 'identify laws that should be repealed.'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."
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
We need one of these in the U.S. (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus a new law that states all new laws must have a sunset (five years max) and must be voted into renewal each sunset.
(save for actual amendments)
Re:thousand and one laws (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll just make them longer.
Note to America (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what can happen in the rest of the civilised world if you vote for the third party.
Re:thousand and one laws (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:1, Insightful)
The others, sure, but isn't gun registration the minimum a government needs to do in terms of protecting Average Joe? Having a murder weapon like this is not a right, nor is it useful. And before you argue the use of cars/scissors/knives for murder, consider these devices, unlike guns, have been designed for other uses. Guns are made with the sole purpose to kill (man or animal), which makes it reasonable to register them.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when is gun registration violating innocent until proven guilty?
Is it the same way as driver and vehicle licensing violates it?
That is... not at all?
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
What? How does that violate "innocent until proven guilty"? More like, "dangerously incompetent with deadly force until proven otherwise".
This is a compliance issue. In certain circumstances it is entirely appropriate for people to be required to comply with police. I suppose next you'll be complaining that people have to pull over to the side of the road when a policeman pulls them over.
Again, a compliance issue. There's no assumption of guilt anywhere.
Re:thousand and one laws (Score:3, Insightful)
Except these codes are sometimes necessary. You clearly have no idea what laws do if you think all there is to it is the criminal code, which is a small and relatively simple section of laws. "IANAL" in this case seems to be "and I don't even have a clue what laws do" - a budget is a law, for one.
Re:thousand and one laws (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Hilariously, lots of NEW laws are being suggested (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's be clear on this: the majority just love their tyranny. For the small minded (you don't have to look far to find them) it's just so much fun to think up things that other people shouldn't be allowed to do.
A Freedom/Repeal bill is great in principle, but it'll never happen in practice. Quite apart from the problem that any repeals will pilloried as Soft On Something, the coalition have very different ideas on what the little people should be free to do: Cons tend to be pro freedom to smoke tobacco and anti freedom to smoke cannabis, and the Dems are t'other way around, for example.
Re:Anything about "racially motivated" (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, sure. Now are you going to the job they did or are you "too proud" and will just keep claiming benefits instead?
Re:I knew things have changed in britain (Score:2, Insightful)
Erm, they are a pair of former public-schoolboy toffs with millions of pounds in personal wealth. Don't fall for their "men of the people" propaganda, they are even more entrenched with the ruling elite than the previous government.
(For the USians, "public schools" in the UK are actually elite private schools for the extremely rich)
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
One case is about insuring against deliberately hampering a police investigation,
Not assisting the police is by no reasonable definition "deliberately hampering a police investigation". Deliberately hampering might include destroying evidence, or lying to the police, or resisting arrest. You cannot deliberately hamper by doing nothing.
Consider for a moment an alternative world in which it is illegal to not actively help the police.
and the other is about forcing false confessions. I simply don't see why allowing one necessarily implies we need to follow the other.
You're asserting that the state should be able to require you to actively cooperate in finding you guilty, using some argument which assumes that the state has a privilege to force "compliance" on the innocent. Do you not think that people in interview are encouraged to confess, even when their guilt is in doubt? Is the problem not that the man under suspicion is not saying what the police want him to say?
That's a separate issue. It's not actually a problem with "innocent until proven guilty".
If a man is innocent then why should he be forced to testify against himself? And if he doesn't testify against himself why should this make him automatically guilty of anything? He should surely be innocent of the crime for which he was initially arrested until he is proven guilty of that crime - not until he can be charged with new crimes simply because of procedural bureaucracy.
Re:We need one of these in the U.S. (Score:1, Insightful)
It wouldn't work. Any law the government didn't want subject to the sunset provision would have a line saying "this law isn't subject to the sunset law". To make this binding you'd have to change the constitution.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a video of Nick Clegg on the front page specifically promising that all the posts will be read.
My first thought was - yeah, it's a great source of material for tracking dissidents.
But it is awesome. I hope it really gets done right.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds great, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a big flaw in the 'highest rated' suggestions system; it sorts first on star rating. That means that an idea with an average 5 star rating and 3 votes trumps an idea with an average 4.8 rating and 100 votes. This is dumb and needs to be changed pronto.
I've already e-mailed and tweeted them about this, I suggest others do the same.
Re:Clegg, Illness not cure. (Score:4, Insightful)
With all due respect, you're talking out of your arse.
If you think Clegg could've gotten a better deal out of the Conservatives despite being by far the smaller coalition partner and having a Labour party not really serious about coalition talks, you're in dreamland. Clegg got the best possible deal he could squeeze out of the Tories, and given that or another immediate general election, I'll take that. The Lib Dems still stand for what they did before, but they were realistic enough to know that in a coalition, they couldn't get everything. They did get a referendum on AV, which is a massive concession considering we've NEVER in our history had a change to our antiquated voting system. But, the Tories presumably wouldn't budge an inch on bullshit like the Digital Economy Act. To get movement on that, The People need to make it very clear how much they hate it... to the Tories. They're the problem here really.
LibDems are juniors partners in the colation. (Score:1, Insightful)
Only in Britain (where people have no idea how coalitions work) do the journalists (lazy ones with an agenda normally) believe that adjusting to the political realities of being a junior partner in a coalition is "selling out".
The reallity is that the coalition is composed of more than 300 Conservatives and around 50 Lib Dems.
It stands to reason to expect that the Lib Dems would bring all their government programme superceding the one of the coalition Senior partners.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:4, Insightful)
The law is all to cock. Can't have a gun unless it is my job to protect government, but can have flammable gas pipeline into my house. Can't drive over the speed limit down a road I travel everyday for 30 years, but 19 year old cop new to the area can. Can't get gypsy camp moved on, but anti-war protest camp can be evicted. Can't remain silent or withhold evidence under police interrogation, but government can 'forget' details or bury things that are 'not in the public interest'.
Maybe a new law to outlaw double standards?
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? That's one twisted way to look at it.
Licensing is the mechanism for regulation. A restaurant owner has to be licensed to operate, and if the quality of the food or sanitary measures falls below a certain level, that license can be revoked and the restaurant has to close. Licenses for cars allows for the regulation of those who have shown themselves competent enough to drive one. If you do something stupid, you get your license revoked and you can no longer drive. I have yet to hear of a credible story of the government revoking a driver's license for no reason. Care to link a source?
Licenses for guns make sense as well. Not having a firearms license and a registered firearm doesn't mean you're considered a felon, it simply means that you have not demonstrated a level of competence required to own a weapon.
But who am I to say anything? I think the "right to bear arms" is one of the most abused statutes in the Constitution. It was put there to address a practical problem - that of the King of England not allowing the citizens to bear arms, making a people's uprising against the military impossible. That was the days when there was a fairly level playing field between citizens and the military. Now, a popular uprising would not likely be done with guns, since type of firearm a citizen can get is significantly less powerful than the military's arsenal.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:2, Insightful)
>Guns are actually a most inefficient way to kill humans, poison is better
Home-owner to potential robber: "Stop or I'll ask you to ingest toxic chemicals!"
I would rather have a gun in my hand than a cop on the phone.
Re:I nearly wrote a serious answer to you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, my belief is that anyone who wants to tell others how to live should not be able to vote.
Re:thousand and one laws (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Look at how well "Congress shall make no law" has worked in the US.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the whole "database of gun owners and what guns they own" thing that are a problem.
Yes, beacuse there's not a database of licensed car drivers, car owners and the cars the own is there... Oh wait... Yes there is.
Re:Magna Carta is irrevocable, did you know? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're a noble, your heir cannot be of someone of lower social class.
If you're a widow, you can't re-marry without permission from the crown.
Rules regarding debt (specifically) to Jews.
Nobility can only be punished by their equals
Women cannot accuse anyone of murder unless the victim was their husband
Lots of rulings regarding specific barons alive at the time and new forests that had been created that are utterly irrelevant now.
Re:thousand and one laws (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that any worse than the average politician?
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying an oven is not designed for cooking food, it's designed to get hot inside.
You are a bonehead (Score:1, Insightful)
The military could not take over a country with 100 million armed individuals. Bomb the cities and lose your economic base. At the end of the day, you need boots on the ground to take over, and there is no way to do that if the populace is armed to the teeth. Look at the chaos a bunch of poorly-armed ragtag extremists cause the military. Imagine if Saddam had not banned guns. Would have been a bloodbath. Even the Japanese military leaders knew during WWII that a ground assault on the US would have been suicide given the number of armed people in the US even at that time.
Uber-Liberal assholes like you are the reason why other countries are gelded into submission.
Re:Seriously? (Score:1, Insightful)
Happy Independence Day, Britain. Looks like you finally learned what it took us 233 years to forget.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
Cute, but utterly ignorant.
This is exactly the problem with modern laws and automated enforcement: everyone slips up momentarily from time to time according to some artificial, precise benchmark. Someone who is generally aware of their vehicle's capabilities and what is going on around them, and who drives at a reasonable speed under those conditions, may still find that they have drifted above the legal limit on occasion, not least because the legal limits in this country are frequently set considerably lower than is justified on any grounds other than "we don't like drivers who go fast". This, by the way, was first explained to me by my driving instructor, an ex-police officer whose husband was still a top-class police driver.
This didn't used to matter, when those same police officers with the same awareness of reality were responsible for enforcing speed limits. If you were doing 80mph on a clear motorway, no-one cared. If you were doing 80mph weaving in and out of traffic on a crowded motorway, you'd get pulled over. Common sense was the rule.
Today, when automated enforcement and fixed penalty notices allow for monitoring every car on numerous occasions during a single journey and penalising even harmless transgressions with no scope for common sense, the situation is different.
By the way, just in case you think this is sour grapes: I have been driving for years, completely clean licence, never pulled over, no RTAs. I just don't like being forced to spend more time watching my speedo and less time watching the road around me because machines have no awareness of reasonable behaviour or context. I would rather road traffic laws provided serious deterrents/punishments for those who were actually doing something harmful, and left everyone else alone -- like any other law, really.
Judging from the responses on the Your Freedom web site so far, this is a very common sentiment in our society today. We're fed up with the nanny state interfering with normal people's everyday lives, and we just want them to stop and go away now, please.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe a new law to outlaw double standards?
Please. You know if they do that, the anti-double-standard law will just not apply to the police, either.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:4, Insightful)
It was put there to address a practical problem - that of the King of England not allowing the citizens to bear arms, making a people's uprising against the military impossible.
Why do Americans have such a twisted view of history? The King of England hasn't had any practical power since a couple of revolutions, the last of which was in 1688 when Parliament kicked the King out for doing things that weren't in the interests of the people, including restricting firearms ownership and raising an Army in times of peace.
It was Parliament, not the King who did everything that the Americans blame on the King.
Since the Glorious Revolution, Parliament has been Supreme (until very recently) with the elected House of Commons holding more and more of the balance of power.
Re:Too late for "innocent until proven guilty" (Score:3, Insightful)
I am also a safe driver with a clean license but I tend to prefer the unbiased judgment of a machine to the arbitrary judgment of a human being. I don't like the privacy issues that cameras raise but as far as doling out punishment for breaking the law is concerned, I don't mind having a camera monitoring people's speed. I just disagree with your assessment that common sense ruled when human police officers were doing the ticketing. Ever since municipalities realized that traffic violations are a source of revenue and instituted ticket quotas (whether explicitly or just through internal "suggestions"), I wouldn't trust a human police officer to be neutral or fair about a speeding ticket.
Re:Magna Carta is irrevocable, did you know? (Score:3, Insightful)
They are actually very much revocable: they were revoked within a decade and had to be forced into being reinstated.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are probably right. The post of "Deputy Prime Minister" was introduced to shut Heseltine up. It's a grandiose sounding title but has no real power, not even a portfolio, so Clegg is in charge of exactly nothing. Business secretary and most of the other posts given to Lib Dems are similarly pointless and devoid of influence.
Re:The Digital Economy Bill isn't going anywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
When exactly was that written and received? It sounds like you got it before the Tories were forced to compromise into a coalition government and compromise they must to keep it afloat.
It's a different game now, the Tories didn't get the majority they wanted, they don't have sole control of the countries law books, they have to accept the Lib Dems viewpoint too.
So the real question isn't whether the Tories will keep the DEA- we know they would have, it's whether the coalition government which is a very different beast will. The answer to that is we simply don't know. The Lib Dems have let the Tories have their way on economic, education and military policy whilst the Lib Dems have had their way on civil liberties, as the DEA is largely a civil liberties issue there's still a reasonable chance the Lib Dem viewpoint will win through.