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Tories lay the legislative foundation for a substantial erosion of democracy in the UK

Brian Leiter

Not all these bills are equally bad, but 1 through 4, by themselves, would do substantial damage.  Curious if UK readers have more insight into how likely these are to pass and whether they are as dangerous as some of them seem to be?

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4 responses to “Tories lay the legislative foundation for a substantial erosion of democracy in the UK”

  1. Phil

    The second of these – which would not so much criminalise dissent as empower police officers to criminalise dissent or not, as they chose – was gutted in the House of Lords the other night; I don't know if the other three will be as unfortunate, but one can only hope so. I'm not optimistic. There's nothing to be hoped for from the Commons, and I think a lot of the Lords' objections to the Police Bill were procedural: the Home Secretary had attempted to stuff the Bill with additional authoritarian provisions *after it had cleared the House of Commons*, and the Lords weren't best pleased with this.

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  2. Peter Gerdes

    The part where they call Steve Hsu a eugenicist (as an obvious insult) really really upset me. Certainly one can have reasonable, even strongly held views that it's morally wrong to let couples use genetic testing (rather than mere random chance…you discard most) to determine what embryo to implant vis IVF. However, the attitude that not only do we not need to engage with the idea that the government might want to help all couples gain access to tech that might help their children avoid unpleasant health effects or predisposition to things like depression, but it's so obviously evil that it's ok to dismiss anyone who wants to help people that way as evil really bothers me.

    If you think it's wrong make an argument but don't presume that the good people who, with the best of intentions, are trying to help parents make choices to make life better for their kids, are akin to the people who went around forcing undesierables to be sterilized.

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  3. Tim

    They will all pass. It's extraordinarily rare for a governing party (i.e. a party with a majority in the House of Commons) to be unable to pass its legislation. And the Tories have a majority of about 80: not impregnable, but pretty solid.

    There are some caveats to this. One is that the legislation may be amended in the Lords, where the Tories do not have a majority (although they are the largest party). This has already happened to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill; the Lords took out some particularly egregious parts of it. It now goes back to the Commons, where the Govt will reinstate the bits that they can. Happily, because of a procedural quirk, the Govt will not be able to reinstate all of the bits of the Bill that the Lords took out. For example, the Govt tried to use the Bill to create a specific criminal offense that would target, basically, protesters who tie/glue/chain themselves to things, and I think this is one of the bits that the Lords took out but that the Govt will be unable to insert back in.

    Something similar might happen with the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, I guess. The Lords are likely to be particularly interested in that Bill, I imagine, given the Lords' traditional role as the highest court of appeal, which they were until the establishment of the Supreme Court about 10 years ago.

    But the power of the Lords is very limited. Yes, they can amend, but unless they are amending bits of the legislation that were inserted by the Lords, the Commons can just put them back in again. (That's the procedural quirk.) So basically the Bills will all pass — maybe with a bit of tinkering at the edges.

    Are they dangerous? Yes, I think so. The expansion of the power to strip people of citizenship is awful. We didn't really ever strip people of citizenship before 2010, and that was fine; why is it so important that the Secretary of State has this power now?. The anti-protest stuff is awful too, although I think that there's a question about how much the police will actually use those powers. They don't really even use all of their existing powers to disrupt demos. Voter ID is utterly pointless — there is no voter fraud (1 convicted case in the 2019 election!). But again, I don't think it's that clear what the effect will be. The Tories are presumably doing it because they think it will be an electoral advantage to them, and there are reasons to think it might be, but I think equally its effects on the turnout of different groups might prove to be negligible.

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  4. Peter Gerdes

    I thought the house of lords could still delay bills they found objectionable by up to a year (or maybe two years but I thought that bill was replaced by the more recent ones). I guess it’s not likely that the tories will call an election before the 2024 date but it’s a possibility.

    I also didn’t really get the fuss over the parts of the bill that gave the parliament the ability to overturn court decisions. I mean, if they can pass the bill giving them the power to do that then surely they already had that power in the first place. I guess it creates a greater presumption of regularity when they do it and in a country without a written constitution that might be significant but it seems less important than this piece makes it out to be. Or am I missing some important aspect of this?

    Regarding the academic freedom aspects I’m not totally convinced of the danger. I mean, at the end of the day someone is making these decisions and I’m not totally convinced that creating a position with the stated job of protecting free speech will somehow make the situation worse. Indeed, given the highly left leaning makeup of universities I could see it being a positive.

    But the other aspects you mention are concerning.

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