Utopia, you are standing in it!

Scope: Extensive provisions for Henry VIII powers in the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill 2017 (hereinafter, the “Repeal Bill”) have become predictably controversial. These powers are mainly found in clauses 7 (‘dealing with deficiencies arising from withdrawal’), 8 (‘complying with international obligations’) and 9 (‘implementing the withdrawal agreement’). The scope of the power in clause 7 is the broadest, allowing Ministers to enact any provision that Parliament could make to remedy ‘any failure … to operate effectively’ or ‘any other deficiency’, remove ‘redundant or substantially redundant’ laws, remove provisions no longer ‘appropriate to retain’. The use of such vague and broad terms fail to reassure that ‘technical’ amendments alone will fall within the scope of these powers. The likelihood that these powers will be used by a minority Government to sneak in policy changes is high, especially at a time when Parliament will have an extremely heavy workload.

Limitations:…

H is for the Henry VIII Clause, a nickname given to a provision in an Act of Parliament that delegates to a minister the power to modify the Act itself, or other Acts of Parliament. The delegation by Parliament of various powers to ministers – ‘delegated legislation’ or ‘secondary legislation’ – became common during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; indeed the increasing complexity of government business meant that it was unavoidable. For many, however, it was associated with the growth in a powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy, and the Henry VIII clause, apparently conferring a sovereign legislative authority on the government itself, was both symbolic of that growth and a dangerous step towards eroding the ability of Parliament to rein it in.

The tag seems first to have been referred to in a parliamentary debate by Lloyd George in the highly controversial National Insurance Bill in 1911. The nickname…

Cross-posted with the Constitution Unit blog.

Nine months after Theresa May first announced that there would be a ‘Great Repeal Bill’, and three and a half months after triggering Article 50, the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill (EUW Bill) was published on 13 July 2017. The Bill is a complex mixture of constitutional change and legal continuity. This post highlights some of its main elements.

Constitutional change

The EUW Bill repeals the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA) (clause 1). The ECA provides the “conduit pipe” through which EU law flows into the UK, and represents a central component of the UK’s current constitutional architecture. The key provisions of the EUW Bill replace the ECA with a new constitutional framework. The main constitutional changes in the EUW Bill include:

• the creation of a new distinct body of law known as “retained EU law”;
• broadly-framed delegated powers for Government to…

Mohammad Sarwar’s recent decision to renounce British citizenship in order to take office as Governor of Punjab province in his native Pakistan is another remarkable step in the career of a man who was the first Muslim Member of Parliament, and the first to take the oaths on the Koran. References to Mr Sarwar’s renunciation of his British citizenship suggests that he did not rely on the fact, but it is a little known point of British nationality law that members of Commonwealth countries who have the right of residence in the UK are eligible for election to the Commons – currently under section 18 of the Electoral Administration Act 2006.

That provision ultimately derives from the ancient principle of British citizenship, that those born within the dominions (including colonies) of the monarch have rights of citizenship, including eligibility for parliament. Traditionally, people who were naturalised subjects, however (naturalization was…

Between April 1^st and June 30^th 2017, a total of seventy reports with content relating to Israel and/or the Palestinians appeared on the BBC News website’s Middle East page, one of which was carried over from the previous quarter.

Some of the reports were produced by other departments (e.g. BBC Technology) or appeared on other pages of the website (e.g. ‘UK’ or ‘US & Canada’) but were also posted on the Middle East page.

Although the Israeli security services recorded 356 terror attacks during the second quarter of 2017 (see ‘related articles’ below), just three of those attacks received coverage on the BBC News website.

(The dates in brackets represent the period of time in which a report was available to visitors to the website’s Middle East page.)

Israeli killed in West Bank car-ramming attack  (6/4/17 to 10/4/17) discussed here

Jerusalem stabbing: Tributes paid to Hannah Bladon