A friend noted that I haven’t been ranting about eloquently pointing out the flaws in the Government’s anti-terror bill, and another cheekily pointed out how the House of Lords, a body I’m very much in favour of reforming, has (partially) saved the day. So.. a quick post on my thoughts about the law, and the crappy state of our constitution.

As well as the horribleness of real life (lots of essay-writing, well, not really writing, more just researching and trying to come up with a topic focus while nervously looking at deadlines) taking up proper blogging time, the bill was so patently illiberal that there wasn’t much more for me to say, apart from it was another shitty law by a government happy to pass bad law that pisses on our liberties, and then more bad law to fix the problems the previous bad laws created, ad nauseum, than actually come up with something other than the first knee-jerk over-authoritarian reaction. And I’ve said that before.

Still, onto the second question - I do have a lot more respect for the House of Lords, especially reading tales of octogenarian peers catching an hour of sleep in their offices then dutifully getting up at 5am to resume debate. But you can’t let the fact that they got the concessions for this bill, making it a bad law rather than a truly awful one, mask the fact that the Lords does need reform - all but 92 of the peers are appointed - and it’s a grim situation when the hereditary peers are the only ones to have undergone some sort of elective process to get there. It was a fortuitous coincidence that this time the Lords were more reasonable than the Commons, but we can’t trust that such an unaccountable system rigged by the government will save us next time round.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 12th, 2005 at 22:40:41 and is filed under General.