Baroness Scotland of Asthal is a popular member of the House of Lords. She is always courteous in debate; she has a good grasp of her brief. She sticks pretty closely to the government line. The majority of the House is probably sympathetic to her in her problems over employing an illegal immigrant.
Yet even peers are bound to have their own reflections. Most of us were Members of the House when the Immigration Bill, under which she was fined £5,000, was introduced. Its most objectionable clause, as one can now see, is the one that made it an absolute offence to employ an illegal immigrant; not only is ignorance no defence, nor is innocence.
The £5,000 fine was imposed for her breach of the rule that one must keep a photocopy of the relevant papers that have been produced by the employee, legal or otherwise.
I feel sure that the House of Lords must have discussed this clause, at least at the report stage, but I confess I have no memory of it. If there was an amendment, and if I had been in the House, I would have voted against this clause, but I have, to my regret, no memory of doing so. I had no idea that a failure to photocopy a cleaning lady’s immigration papers might make one liable to a fine that could amount to £10,000.
It has been argued, reasonably enough, that Lady Scotland brought it on herself. She helped to take the Bill through the house and should have remembered the terms of the Act. So she should, and so, to a much lesser degree, should I. But she did not.
I suspect that the terms of the Act were not known to most of us unless we were professionally involved in hiring workers. Of course, one would expect an employment agency or a gang master to remember the detail. I suppose one could add an Attorney-General to that list.
The ordinary citizen is likely to turn the issue round. If the Attorney-General, who had actually helped to carry the Bill through Parliament, failed to remember its terms, how can anyone else be expected to do so?
If the police broke down Lady Scotland’s cleaner’s door in broad daylight, must the rest of us expect to have our front doors knocked down for similar offences? Is it possible to get through life in modern England without breaking the law? I suspect that no one who runs a car would get through more than a day or two without committing at least a civil offence. We’re all lawbreakers nowadays.
I have now served in the House of Lords for 20 years, and enjoyed it. During this time our House has been an unresting machine for passing new laws; we always have steam up to pass yet another statute. Many of my colleagues have become great experts at revising the often misdrafted Bills that come to us from the Commons. I ask myself whether the net effect of all this legislation has been to do more harm than good.
I suspect that the last 20 years of legislation have indeed had a net negative effect on British society. They have certainly created a society in which there are literally thousands of legislative traps into which anyone may fall. These traps are potentially much more damaging to people who venture on the off-piste slopes of public life. They can lose their reputations as well as paying fines.
Outside public life, Lady Scotland would have paid her fine, substantial as it was, and that might have been an end of the matter. If she had kept out of politics, and avoided becoming a judge, her fine would have been worth, at most, a 50-word paragraph in the news in brief column of her local newspaper. That would have been unpleasant, but not a matter on which her career would have depended.
It is bad enough that we have become a thoroughly bureaucratised society, in which the phrase “law-abiding citizen” had become self-contradictory. Yet the Prime Minister believes that we need more regulation; he intends to introduce more regulatory legislation, even before the election. In yesterday morning’s BBC interview, Mr Brown told Andrew Marr that regulations to increase fairness, an imprecise objective, would be a central theme of his general election campaign.
At any rate, I thought that was what Mr Brown was saying; I had become rather confused listening to the earlier part of the interview. Mr Brown’s arguments and assertions seemed to crowd each other out, like a swarm of bees attacking an intruder. He did tell us, as though that would be good news, that he proposed in the coming weeks to introduce the strictest banking regulations of any country in the world. That is goodbye to British banking. He also made it clear that he plans to continue as Prime Minister.
Britain is already overregulated. In historic experience, most politicians are very bad at making business judgments. If banking is politically regulated, that will make London less attractive as a banking centre, and less efficient. It would be the same if the Government imposed a new regulatory regime on British football.
“Fairness” would require that every team should win the same number of matches as it lost. Women would have equal places with men on the field. Harriet Harman would replace Sir Alex Ferguson as the manager of Manchester United. All footballers would receive the same rate of pay, perhaps one-and-a-half times minimum wage. Football would be regulated by Offboot, which would report to Lord Mandelson. That would be fair football.
In 1951 and again in 1979 the Conservatives came back to power after one of Labour’s economic crises. In both cases the Conservatives got rid of a large part of the regulatory structure. That would be more difficult in 2010, because many of the regulations are European and are not in Britain’s jurisdiction. Yet the economy would be worse if Labour won the election and expanded bureaucratic controls. Britain needs less and better regulation. In this case, “more means worse”.
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William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times. He was Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times before becoming Editor of The Times in 1967, a position he held until 1981. He was made a life peer in 1988. Since 1992 he has been a columnist for The Times, writing on a variety of issues. He has also been chairman of the Broadcast Standards Council and British Arts Council
Columns urging greater openness in family courts win Paul Foot Award
The Editor of the TLS writes on books, people and politics
Mary Beard of Cambridge and the TLS on culture ancient and modern
Explore Newcastle Gateshead with the award-winning childrens author David Almond
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