ADK           Ignorance of the Law is no excuse        Sun 26 Feb 2006

The statement at the top of this page is often quoted as if it were a reasonable thing to say.  But just think about it.

Just recently there has been a couple of private schools who have been fined quite a large sum of money for for doing what most private schools have been doing for a great many years.  As a result of an EU Directive, a Statutory Instrument has been passed that made the practice illegal.  This heinous crime was to exchange information about the policy of setting fees.  There are two points that need serious consideration by the people who scrutinise government policy on Human Rights.

Statutory Instruments are a back-door method of introducing laws onto the Statute Book without Parliament having any input into the law-making process.  In fact Parliament is often unaware that there is a new piece of law in place. This seems as close to dictatorship as it is possible to get.  Even Hitler and Staling let their population know what laws applied to them.  Not only that you may not feel the law is just, you don't even know what the law is until you are in Court charged with breaking it.  This may be reasonable when you are charged with a social crime that everybody feels is sinful.  Bur when an activity that has taken place over many years and been seen by all to be reasonable, to suddenly have it made the subject of Criminal Law, seems to me to be perverse.

I have a question: how is a citizen supposed to know that a new Law has been enacted?  The Law is so vast and complicated that highly learned people who have spent years studying the subject have to spend a lot of time and money finding out what the Law actually is.  I am something of a pedant, but I honestly don't know the answer to that question.  I could bankrupt myself with lawyers fees, and still be unaware of a new piece of law that applied to me.

This seems to be another example of stealth taxation, similar to speed cameras.  On this last topic, they make me less safe as I have to keep a constant eye on the speedo to the detriment of watching the road conditions.  What conclusion can one draw if one believes that our political masters know what they are doing?  But I sometimes wonder if they really know what they are doing.  Take the legal requirement that a Councillor is not permitted to represent his constituency above any other constituency within the Council.  This absurd piece of law has been highlighted by the Sunday Telegraph on February 26 2006.  One Councillor I spoke to thinks it is part of the "Law of Unintended Consequences" that Whitehall so regularly falls into.  But it is being enforced in Oswestry Council at the time of writing.