On Tuesday we debated the second reading of the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill.
I’m not sure quite when we started calling weights and measures ‘metrology’, but my prejudice is that any recourse to newspeak is probably to cloak some Orwellian enterprise.
The Secretary of State insisted that it was a purely technical measure: That, as a consequence of Brexit, government needs new powers to regulate standards.
In order to reassure suspicious Euro-sceptics, he insisted that there was no hidden agenda to use the Bill’s provisions to establish alignment with European product regulations. On the contrary, he said that the Bill was a neutral measure, and that it could be used to establish new British standards which have so often in the past established the international standards.
Indeed he reassured us by saying that the last Conservative administration had been planning to bring forward just such a Bill.
We were not. Our Bill would have differed in a vitally important respect. Its aim would have been the same: to provide the architecture for establishing product standards given that we no longer rely on the European Commission to do that for us. But we would not, as the current bill does, handover the power to legislate entirely to ministers.
Parliament has done enormous damage to our constitution by delegating powers to independent law-making bodies, so much so, that when the public complain about some outrageous decision or situation, Parliament finds that it cannot put it right because it simply gave away the power to do so. We have had a classic example of this in the last few weeks when the woke-obsessed Sentencing Council sought to undermine a fundamental principle of justice, equal treatment before the law. When the Lord Chancellor and Parliament objected, we were told to get stuffed. We are now in the absurd position of having to introduce emergency legislation to put the Sentencing Council back in its box.
This Metrology Bill takes the proper power of Parliament to legislate and hands it unlimited to Ministers. Whilst, the aim of the bill may be about the better regulation of products; it also gives the Government the power to do what they like, when they like, for reasons they do not have to explain, and then impose it as they see fit. And all with the coercive and intrusive powers of search, confiscation and arrest, all of this without having to return and seek the consent of Parliament.
Democratic institutions, particularly when led by decent and principled people, need to take care to legislate against the worst case, such as government falling into less scrupulous hands. Power must always be limited, because -as Lord Acton observed- it corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.