26 days to go - In which Iain makes a bit of a mess, then makes a retrospective change to the law to cover it up!

11/04/15

Dear Claire,

Yes, OK, here it is! The first of what will undoubtedly be a number of letters concerning our favourite Secretary of State, the very slippery, mendacious and deeply unpopular Iain Duncan Smith, referred to by his favourite acronym IBS. Sorry, I mean IDS. Actually no, we’ll stick with IBS as this represents what he has come to mean to a sizable proportion of the populace.
 

It will only be a short letter today because I have spent a few hours getting the blog going on the internet. If you’d like to have a look at it, it’s here: http://dearclaireperry.blogspot.co.uk/  Thanks are due, once again, to Thomas G Clark and his excellent blog ‘Another Angry Voice’. Definitely worth a read if you have some time.

Anyway, we’ll have a look at some legislation. Remember when IBS introduced the mandatory labour scheme during the parliamentary session which has just come to an end? This was successfully challenged through the courts, who ruled the scheme unlawful on the basis that the rules drawn up to support it were incomprehensible. I wonder how much taxpayers’ money was spent on that.

This gave our Irritable Duncan Smith a bit of a problem! The government became potentially liable to pay compensation to the thousands of people unlawfully thrust into this Orwellian nightmare of wretched destitution.

If you are familiar with Iain's boundless contempt for the law, the public, the unemployed, the taxpayer, the disabled, the dead, the concept of labour rights and for coherent and rational debate, you'll know that he would have had no intention of doing anything other than desperately trying to cover up his blunders: He responded to this situation of his own making, by rushing "emergency legislation" through parliament retrospectively to amend the rules.

Let’s now turn to Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights: The imposition of retrospective law is forbidden. For IBS to force this through is an abuse of process and of office. This is like setting the drink-drive limit to half its current level of blood/alcohol, then applying the legislation back to 2010, so everyone tested in the last 5 years that was above this new level but below the old level is guilty of drunk driving.

So IBS’s “mandatory unpaid labour or destitution” rules being declared unlawful because they’re impossible to understand begs the question of how it might have been possible for people to understand the new emergency rules that hadn’t even been written yet? Applying the law retrospectively, because the original rules were unintelligible, alters the judgement of the Court of Appeal, which means people can be punished for failing to comply with rules that hadn’t even been written at the time!

The imposition of retrospective law is a fascist concept because it grants the state new powers to criminalise law abiding citizens for engaging in activities that were not criminal offences at the time.

Taken to extremes, this process could be used by the government to target particular groups with retrospective legislation. Are the trade unions being a nuisance? A bit of retrospective legislation and we can round ‘em up and charge ‘em!

It doesn't matter whether you believe that the particular group of unemployed people that were thrust into destitution for refusing to comply with Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful mandatory work schemes are deserving of compensation or not. The bigger issue is whether you agree with the principle of retrospectively applied laws and the dangerous precedent that would be set if Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP are allowed to get away with simply rewriting the laws of the land and applying them retrospectively.

No wonder the Tories want to do away with the European Convention on Human Rights!

Kind regards

Polly