Add all the talk Tories are doing about doing away with the ECHR should have everybody afraid….
The tories are introducing a bill, which they want passed by the end of this year, that goes way beyond anything the UK leaving the ECHR will impose on us.
The Retained EU Law Bill, or the 'bonfire of EU rules' as popularised in the UK press, is such a confused mess, it's affect will threaten the legality of just about everything, on every level, in whatever direction you care to consider.
In short, no one will know where UK law begins and ends. It goes far beyond anything any country has imposed on itself before, and literally every piece of legislation in the UK, from the legality of speed camera readings to health and safety at work, will be unclear and the simplist of court cases at the moment will be mired in a complexity requiring definitions from the highest court in the land.
It boils down to the government wanting to cancel EU Laws, but as we were members of the EEC, then the EU, for 50 years, legal decisions will have to be made on laws introduced while we were members, but which of those laws were on the statute books in UK law before they were overwritten by EEC and EU directives?
The crucial point is, were the the UK laws repealed by parliament when the EEC/EU directives came into force, or are they still part of our constition because they weren't repaeled and written off?
Nobody knows the answer to those points in so many areas at the moment, and as for our membership of the ECHR, it is written in to so many treaties and agreements we have signed over the decades, it should be a given we will remain members. The consequences for rejecting that commitment are defined in other treaties we have signed, such as the Vienna Convention on the Legalty of Treaties, but none of that matters to a tory base these days that think we should be able to act as we please and blow migrant boats out of the water without any concern it would be a war crime!
