This Space for Rent

Say what you will about Tony Bliar, but you can’t say that he thinks small.

After noting that the progress of tyranny in the American Imperium is being slightly impaired by the teeny detail that it's all illegal and that Mount Doom on the Potomac has to occasionally go and get their minions in the Senate to retroactively legalize their crimes, the Labour party has proposed a bill that will effectively abolish Parliament, by allowing the ruling party (remember the old days when the Labour party was a liberal party?) to modify any law (including the law that allows them to modify any law) by ministerial fiat as long as it doesn't increase taxation or impose a >2 year prison sentence.

Note I said "modify any law"; those pesky "increase taxation or impose a >2 year prison sentence" clauses are just as modifiable as anything else.

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws being all flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it) d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Now, I'm sure it's possible that the entire stinking Labour cabinet has suddenly been struck with a realization that they've been desperately and pathetically wrong about how they should govern the country, and that they don't realize that once this incarnation of the Enabling Act was passed that a future corrupt government could use it to drag the lot of them to the gibbet, but I am not convinced. If Labour did not intend to cause harm, why would they read the bill out on a nice quiet day when almost nobody was in the House of Commons?

On a related note, I see that the movie version of Moore & Lloyd's V for Vendetta is about to be released. The comic was escapist fiction, but the movie might be more of a documentary.