UK Government asks: "Which laws would you like to see repealed?"
yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk
yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk
Virtually all these sources of law are what might be called "top down" - that is, once the mechanisms have been set up in a society that enable citizens to have some form of say in how a government is constituted and how its laws are enacted, the institutions take over and generate the laws going forward, whether through legislators, judges, or regulators, and average people basically get stuck with the results, having only limited recourse to do anything about any of this directly except for the occasional vote at the ballot box, participation in political campaigns, and the exercise of speech rights aimed at influencing the political process.
Given this top-down nature of law (in general), a site such as this will inherently have only limited value at best. The idea is to have politicians be more connected with the citizenry and less "out of touch" by being able to hear what ails average people and what they want changed. That is fine in itself but, presumably, the ability of an average citizen to sound off generally is already pretty substantial and especially in our modern age where blogs and the like have substantially enhanced that ability. With social media, many of the ideas coming from the citizenry can also take on a viral impetus, magnifying their impact. And, thus, it should be no secret to politicians what the big issues of the day generally are insofar as average people are reacting to them. This sort of site, one would guess, would do little to add anything meaningful to the knowledge base that politicians already possess of what within the law agitates people and calls for some form of change.
This sort of site might serve as a filtering mechanism by which the popular pulse might be better measured than from a random sampling of popular opinion but how is this any better than, say, a poll commissioned to sound out opinion on any given issue (even assuming that the input can be meaningfully organized so that it is not just random input from who knows what source)? If the site gets countless complaints about a particularly oppressive law from civil libertarians that business interests might support, or about overweening regulations that businesses hate but civil libertarians support, what does that add to the mix that is in any way meaningful? And how would this serve to influence politicians who already have their own philosophy about such issues, one way or the other? Do they listen to their boosters or to their detractors? If to the detractors, how will this have an impact if the site is not designed to afford any opportunity to make meaningful arguments that might persuade? Even if it could serve to sway politicians in some way, how would this affect the 90%+ of the laws that they don’t directly control (e.g., judge-made laws, constitutional laws, bureaucratic regulations)?
I have no problem with participatory democracy and do believe that making government more accessible to its citizens is a good thing. No one wants "top-down" rule in any absolutist sense of tyranny and, in a free society, the more accountable the politicians are to those who elect them the better.
But, given the realities of modern political institutions, the practical effect of such a site would seem to be negligible except that it gives the politicians promoting it an appearance of wanting to reach out and be responsive to average people. This in itself might have value but far more for the politicians involved than for the citizens affected by their actions.
I hope this doesn't sound cynical but, viewed with a professional eye (i.e., as one who deals with law in many forms), the impact of this site as structured on the law itself is very likely to be nil. Maybe with a different approach the idea could be better implemented. As is, though, I would call it more a stunt than anything else. Of course, I am not directly familiar with the political realities of the U.K. and may be off on this - from a distance, that is how I would assess it.
Since precedents are formed in the particulars of specific cases -- with the parties involved in the case directly participating in the arguments brought to the court -- and are then broadened and deepened as they are applied to more and more cases, I would consider this the most bottom-up form of law.
Participatory democracy can be, and often is, much more of a top-down proposition, and is largely responsible for the modern accumulation of statutory cruft.
But I have a few reservations - no. 10 has had a petition part of their website for years now - the problem was that any ideas that didn't fit with the government's ideas already were ignored. Petitions with only hundreds of signatures got noticed, those withtens of thousands got ignored. It's perfectly possible that this will just be repeated in a different form.
If it does work, then we might get ill informed opinion taking precedence - such as people voting against say road user charging without understanding the true costs and benefits of the system... But that's always a problem with democracy, so who knows how to solve that?
Also, there appears to be some technical issues with the site. There's no way to class entries as duplicates, and as such there are already man redundant posts - say on cannabis legalisation. When you rank by rating, they make the mistake that Amazon make - one 5 star rating is worth more than 20 five star ratings and 1 one star rating.
But I have a few reservations - no. 10 has had a petition part of their website for years now - the problem was that any ideas that didn't fit with the government's ideas already were ignored.
I think your second statement does a nice job of counter-acting your first.
Maybe I'm cynical, but this looks like a pretty shallow publicity ploy. I'd love to see some real change come from this (or sites like this), but I'd be shocked if it actually happened.
The real test will be when the Countryside Alliance (disclosure: I am a member) use the site to vote en masse for the repeal of the Hunting Act.
I was going for naïve hope followed by the crushing realism of politics.
Even if any of these ideas did persuade the deputy primemi ister, what's he going to do?
(as it is I think the coalition has weathered the new budget really well considering it was always going to piss of, well, everyone :))
http://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/chairman-gutted-as-icc-s...
(Ah, the ambiguity of acronyms.)
I'm sure this will be a very positive government in terms of its changes. Then they'll have public support and will strong-arm whatever they want, and in their third run of it (if they get one) they'll bastardize everything they do and make people go running and screaming to try and get Labour back in power to reverse the damages, just for the cycle to repeat.
It's like steering a car. A sober driver makes incremental changes and goes in a straight line. England is like a drunk driver, we don't notice a problem till its too late and we hard-swerve to get back on the road just to find ourselves in oncoming traffic to swerve right back off the road.
Except for that one about Alan Turing.
Since we cannot stop 100% of the crimes, usually laws only get tougher with time.
Rather than having a knee jerk reaction to create new laws to "do something" - the government should be able to propose new laws but these would sit in limbo for a reasonably long time period (say 2 years) and then have to be voted on again before they actually become law.
I'm much less concerned with laws passed in haste than I am with laws passed for eternity. All laws should have a sunset clause, something very cumbersome to override, so that two years or so down the line, if there's no longer a strong case for a law, it goes off the books.
Having to constantly work to keep existing laws on the books would make it harder to add new laws as well. (The downside is you know this would lead to lawyers trying to craft new laws that combined multiple existing laws, using impenetrable language, leading to the point where we have just one law: "Sorry, whatever it is you're doing is illegal.")
An immediate legislative response may be required, but having the law expire in some future period of time (2/5/7 years) means the government is forced to vote again if it's worth keeping.
On the surface this seems like a poll for general housekeeping, but I suspect it's just an attempt to do away with tax laws.
http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/repealing-unnecessary-laws/rep...
Obsolete clauses, and those that exist only for the narrow interest of just one or a few campaign donors, should then stick out like sore thumbs -- with either no one supporting them, or only obvious stooges (eg paid lobbyists). Those without a certain baseline of continuing support would automatically expire after a certain period. (Clauses wouldn't individually require majority support -- just some support so that some true person is accountable for explaining why such handouts exist/persist.)
The same process could also be applied to bills under consideration.
The version control is a very good idea that might actually work in practise. At least from a technical point of view. I don't know whether some people actually prefer the old system of amending.
This is a bad idea for the same reason that pushing massive untested changesets into an application would be a bad idea. Incremental, atomic changes that could be revoked is a much better practice on nearly every front (except for maintenance of the power of politicians)
Under our current system in the U.S., not even the representatives and senators themselves write, let alone read the legislation they're voting on (http://www.govtrackinsider.com/articles/2010-03-24/whowrites...). The lay-person has far more personal challenges to address (e.g. family, career) than educating themselves in legal-speak in order to comprehend legal code itself.[1]
Better, I think to use causes to abstract and simplify the underlying legislation, as I'm attempting to do in http://votereports.org - which is akin to telling the pilot where you want to go, rather than how to fly.
Incidentally, there are a number of sites which enable you to indicate support for bills under consideration, to varying effect, including votereports, lawilike on facebook, visiblevote, opencongress, newballot and certainly others.
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[1] As it is, media and bloggers don't even link to the bills they write about: http://infovegan.com/2010/06/19/bloggers-and-bills/. Personally I take this to be an indication of how little demand for and comprehension of this info on the reader side.
Then, the areas of controversy or obscurity would start to stick out in automated/ranked analysis. Activists (of all stripes) would point out areas for a closer look with URLs.
It is a system for calling attention to things, in turn -- not necessarily forcing preemptive review of (or expertise on) everything.
It could also work if the only people who register support/opposition are elected legislators. In this variant, by default, if you've voted for a law, you're marked as supporting all its clauses. A legislator can then go in -- after the fact -- and remove their name from those clauses they don't specifically support. (When replaced, the new seatholder inherits the previous legislators' positions, until they choose to update them.)
If/when a clause has zero supporters -- no one in the current legislature is willing to go on record as sponsoring it -- then it enters a sunset period. If it doesn't get another on-the-record defender in 6 months to a year, it expires.
Thus, every law, when passed, has coverage for every clause -- but then legislator shame and/or turnover leaves the most embarrassingly narrow clauses with fewer and fewer supporters facing more and more negative attention.
Compare it with the "enforcement priority list" for crime concept about midway through this piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/business/economy/04view.ht...
By focusing attention on one egregious clause at a time -- as the 'least sponsored' or 'most opposed' -- the normal unaccountability legislators enjoy, because citizens are distracted and their concerns are diffused over the entire legal code, can be remedied.
This would go well with another favorite reform of mine, which is the Delegatory Republic, described here: http://www.keithgould.com/2009/08/delegatory-representation....
Basically it's a system of representation in which it's direct democracy in the base-case, yet any individual can at any time empower another with their vote (thus making them their representative). Ultimately you get a hierarchy of delegation, with what we would currently call reps would just be those who at any moment in time currently have the top vote empowerment totals. No terms, not necessarily any districts, no need for parties or runoffs or anything of the sort. Just an online system for tracking the delegations.
However, there's a separate concern, apart from whether a system would work, which is how to bring it about. I'm a big believe in Condorcet & Approval voting, but getting them through the public process, with established players dead-set against them, is an enormous challenge.
Part of my thinking with VoteReports is that it approximates the Delegatory Republic, where the delegatees are report creators, rather than other individuals, but within the current system. That part is key: it doesn't require systemic change to implement, the change can be brought about from outside the system.
So that's another point to think on, for projects like these: what can I do now? How can it work from the outside?
The problem with this analogy is that the incentives of the pilot are strongly aligned with yours. If he delivers you to Paris rather than SF, you'll never fly with him again. You probably also have legal remedies against the airline, which if you exercised them would cause the pilot to lose his job.
In contrast, the incentives of lawmakers and bureaucrats are not aligned with those of ordinary citizens. For instance, in the face of budget shortfalls, government should cut the least vital services first, perhaps reducing the salaries of employees. Instead, they tend to cut the most important services first in an effort to increase support for tax hikes. The MTA in NYC is doing this, for example:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/12/13/2009-12-13_mt...
Abstracting and simplifying the underlying legislation assumes the politicians aren't lying to you. That's always a bad assumption, the devil is usually hidden in the details.
But the key point is: I don't suggest or assume it should be the politicians themselves who tell you where you've ended up and who has brought you there. It's the activists and politicos of the world I look to.
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from James Madison, from Federalist Paper #62:
"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"
In my opinion, Madison was as correct now as he was then.
Simplicity and fairness and effectiveness are all in tension with each other.
The only "idea" someone came up with was (and I paraphrase heavily, since it was a while ago): "You know those hood things the Muslims wear? They should ban those because you can't see who you're talking to." When the reporter noted that this was creating a new law rather than removing an existing one, the response was, "Oh yeah.. you're right!"
This policy is a shriveled vegetarian sausage thrown at a collectively dim, politically unaware and undeserving populace. It'll end up mushed into the ground and forgotten within months.
I don't have any illusions that it will change society much, but it probably can't hurt too much either.
Legislatures would be required to positively reaffirm any existing statutory laws within a mandated interval before their expiration in order for them to remain in force.
This would alter the political incentives just enough to allow a great deal of bad policy to expire quietly without legislators risking the consequences of being actively engaged in a repeal campaign.
Just make sure that re-affirming old laws takes some effort.
However I wonder how businesses would react to the uncertainties of certain laws expiring, just because the nation is not in a mood to re-affirm them?
Refreshing to see this happening.
Someone should build a generic webapp to host this to let people post and vote the law to repeal. I'm sure you can get a government grant somewhere to bootstrap the site.
Finding out which laws violate your rights is pretty difficult if you don't have one.
""" Britain, of course, is famous for its unwritten constitution - a phrase which strikes the worm-gnawed American brain as oxymoronic. In fact, unwritten constitution is a tautology. It is our written constitution - or large-C Constitution - which is a concept comical, impossible, and fundamentally fraudulent. Please allow me to explain.
England had a constitution well before America had a Constitution, and De Quincey (whose political journalism is remarkably underrated) defines the concept succinctly:
...the equilibrium of forces in a political system, as recognised and fixed by distinct political acts...
If this is what is going to happen, the next President or Prime Minister who will want to do something similar will have to promise he will follow through, or he/she will be made fun of.
Nope. You can pull it again and again. Some folks will notice but they'll be ignored because folks really want to believe.
As the song goes "And I'll get on my knees and pray We don't get fooled again" but you know how that ended....
For example, the last time immigration was a hot topic in the US, we passed an amnesty together with a promise to secure the borders so there wouldn't be an explosion of illegal immigration. The result was an amnesty and no change in enforcement, so there was an explosion in illegal immigration because the "huddled masses yearning to mow lawns" rightly figured out that there'd be calls for another amnesty. And yes, the amnesty advocates are promising enforcement this time too. (The more honest are saying that they won't offer enforcement first because they can't get amnesty if enforcement works.)
The UK doesn't really have a significant number of people who vocally and unwaveringly support particular political parties. This may be because there is a greater proportion of political cynics in the UK, or perhaps it merely appears that way because of our smaller population.
Regardless, the way politicians are portrayed in the media, and the general perception of politicians in general, is almost entirely negative.
Oh really? Half of the Labor/Conservative vote isn't reliable?
In any event, the belief at issue need not be in a political party but in "what govt does".
No; but people vote for what they consider the least worst option, not because they actually like the politicians. There's certainly very little vocal support for them!