Summum ius summa inuria

The more Latin learned people amongst ye vast crowds out there who are looking to satisfy your perpetual need for knowledge might know what the title of this post means. It is quite accurately translated as 'the more law, the less justice' - a Latin proverb of unknown origin.

If you look at the post that was published just before this one you will notice that the notion of the "The United Kingdom" will be pretty much, 100%, undermined once the Lisbon Treaty has been passed then we will not just have 80% of our laws written in Brussels but more like 97% to chose an arbitrary figure close to a 100%.

With this is mind one must but ask; how many laws do they pass, without assigning a time span to that question before knowing the answer we can most likely get a more accurate picture of the insanity that is currently infiltrating the political classes in Whitehall and in Brussels.

First though, to give you a rough idea how a law is made:

1) An election manifesto promise
2) A government department after an election has been won
3) The influence of pressure groups
4) The influence of experts within their field
5) In response to an EU directive

These in turn can either be (as considered by Parliament):

1) Government Bills
2) Private Members’ Bill
3) Private Bills
4) Hybrid Bills
5) Statutory Instruments

All of these are rather self explanatory to anyone with an ounce of knowledge of British politics, ergo lets move on.

Statutory Instruments make up the bulk of all UK legislation, with an average of around 3,500 passed every year for much of the last two decades. In 2008, 3,389 Statutory Instruments were passed, while the UK Statute Law Database lists 2,414 results for the same year.

I know I said ergo, but screw it, I am going to explain briefly what an statutory instrument actually is:

"By-law, order, ordinance, or regulation issued by a government or its agencies for the enactment or enforcement of a specific statute. Statutory instruments detail the measures that must be taken by the entities to whom they are addressed. Also called statutory rule."

All in all, governments make shit loads of rules to the point where it is now becoming a bit ridiculous. Why governments keep on pledging to "cut red tape" (In the 17th and 18th century, the English typically bound legal documents and official papers with red tape. To this day most barristers' briefs are tied in a pink coloured ribbon known as red tape. Traditionally, official Vatican documents were also bound in red cloth tape.) though as you might have heard governments, particularly this one preceded over by New Labour, are awfully bad a keeping their promises - most likely why this government is the most unpopular since statistics begun.

So, what about EU law then? Now here is an interesting one: The lefties reckon that about 10-20% of British law originates in Brussels - they would wouldn't they? Daniel Hannan reckons it is about 84% Hmm, now here is a really tough one; Leftist Eurocrats vs. a Member of the European Parliament who albeit hates the EU is a very clever man which cannot be said of, well come to think of it, any current minister of HMS government. For some numbers then, we all like to number crunch so here we go, actually just go to this blog post over at Open Europe which the entire blogosphere has copycatted including Nosemonkey's EUtopia and and Liberal Conspiracy - very bad sportsmanship chaps, very bad. But to get a number on it, from admittedly, a biased source (I hate the EU as much as anyone but I must admit that UKIP are a bit biased at times, this said though they if anyone have correctly identified the real danger that is the EU so there research is probably more correct than any other) we have it as 8 laws a day.

There you go folks, go figure, I hear there is a talk of a "deregulation minister" from the Tories - pah, that wont happen as with most things the MAIN THREE promise. Words into to action seems to be an unwholly impossible task for the governments of today (spanning from roughly 1950 - before that they actually managed to do a fair bit).

And we have the whole Sharia "law" issue.. (notice my euphemistic emphasis on the quotation marks, meaning that I think the whole concept of religious law is a complete and utter joke).