Acts Are Not Law

Acts are not law, which is why they are called "Acts". They are optional. If you want them to be law, you can agree to them, which makes a contract.  But you don't have to. And even if you do agree (because you made a mistake about your rights, for example) you can get out of that contract by making a complaint. 

So, your local council can give you a parking ticket under an Act, and if you don't agree to it you can just post it back to them with a note saying, "I don't agree," so there is no contract.  If you paid in the past because you didn't know this, you can make a complaint and get your money back.

Same with council tax, and other taxes like income tax. They are just optional requests to pay, and if you've paid by mistake or because you didn't know about this, you can just make a complaint.

This is why Theresa May can take Britain out of the EU any time she likes, because the British parliament only joined under its own Act. There was no contract, because only people in Britain can agree to Acts and the EU is based in Brussels. She says she wants Britain out by March, but really she is just delaying because she's a Remainer and didn't like the vote. She hopes people will change their minds, so we should just have an election to get a government that will take us out.

If you've read this far, then I hope you've felt the same rising sense of panic that I did when some bloke told me the first three paragraphs worth of this horseshit last night (at the end of which he said, "Education is a fine thing, eh?"). The rest I extrapolated based on his special world view, and that of a van driver who told Channel 4 news that Britain could have already left the EU and absolutely must do so by March, "no Article 50, no ifs, no buts". 

It seems most people believe that everything in their head is true. They then look for validation among their family and friends. Their more appealing ideas spread like a virus and are eventually fed back to them in the tabloids and the social media and by politicians who will do anything for more votes, even if it means ignoring the constitution, court rulings they don't like and the rule of law.

We live in an idiocracy. 

Swinegate and Consitutional Reform

I've just seen some patronising rubbish in the Spectator about concern over MP's expenses being overkill and somehow bad for the British democratic process.

Swinegate is just the straw that broke the camel's back. At different times, on different issues that each of us cares about, we have all felt that politicians are up to no good in their various machinations. Now we've all caught them, red-handed, pulling the same stunt at the same time. It does not matter that we have merely caught a crowd of them failing to do something as basic as filling out an expense form with diligence and propriety. The panic-stricken response right across the political spectrum is clear evidence that the politicians now know that we know just how opaque and unaccountable Parliament is generally.

The great news is that this has alerted a wider community of people to consider what goes on in Westminster. But these are still early days in this process of awakening. So it's way too early to constrain debate by saying that constitutional reform is not the answer, for example. Let's get the whole sorry parliamentary institution laid out on the table and then figure out how to reform it.

More light, please! We have work to do...