Over The Counter Culture

Over-legislation and undemocratic trojan extension of powers

There’s much to be criticised about the huge volume of new Acts passed by Parliament. With the three main parties showing ideological alignment as they abandon old positions, ride bikes into work and fight for the vote-rich middle ground, it could be argued that Bills in Parliament really aren’t challenged, debated or considered enough as they pass through and become yet another law to abide by. The number of new acts hasn’t changed much – but their size has:

(1911: 430 pages; 1960: 850 pages; 2006: 4609 pages)

What’s more worrying is the volume of legislation we face that has never even been seen or debated by our elected law-making representatives. Over 10,000 pages’ worth of Statutory Instruments – “mini-laws” passed by people Parliament delegated its power to in a parent Act – are passed every year. In 2006-2007, 1,380 SIs were created; 12 got reviewed by Parliament in House, and just 202 were looked at by Parliamentary committees.

More worrying still is what our government uses SIs for. A Times article today is prompting outrage over the recent use of an SI to give a myriad of government-created bodies the power to use mafia asset forfeiture powers on just about anybody – and then telling them that they can fund their operations with assets they seize.

This is powerful, intrusive lawmaking: Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, upon a conviction of a crime however minor, a crown court will assess whether, on the balance of probabilities (rather than the stricter criminal test of certainty beyond reasonable doubt), you benefited by more than £5000 – and then seize whatever it likes which you can’t defend (see a scenario at the end).

The bodies with the powers to investigate you (until recently, that was just the Serious Organised Crime Agency – basically, police detectives – now, Royal Mail, the Tube and your council, amongst others) don’t actually have to prove, with any certainty whatsoever, that your money came from a crime – so you had better have a good story lined up.

The Long Arm of the Law

What irks is not just that this back-door bastardisation of a legitimate law will give government ever more reach into everybody’s lives, by ‘accredited civilian investigators’, not just those subject to investigation by the Serious & Organised Crime Agency, by SOCA’s detectives; it’s that this is shamelessly being done to create a new revenue stream. That’s right:

The expansion of seizure powers is part of a Home Office plan to “embed” financial seizure across the criminal justice system. Ministers set a target to recover £250 million in criminal assets by 2010, rising to £1 billion per year soon after.

An “explanatory memorandum” says that a swath of financial investigators attached to the newly empowered bodies will be accredited, trained and monitored by another quango, the National Policing Improvement Agency. The memo adds that asset seizure will result in financial rewards: “Investigation bodies will receive a share of money recovered as additional funding to incentivise further work in recovering the proceeds of crime.”

This effectively completes the vicious loop that’s been developing:

- Pass ever larger laws in parliament without proper debate and scrutiny; stuff that legislation full of delegatory trojans (SI powers) allowing most of UK lawmaking to actually happen without adding to Parliament’s workload.

- Use SIs to totally pervert laws designed at harming dangerous, influential crime kingpins to let councils, Royal Mail, Transport for London and local councils search, seize and freeze assets of petty criminals without police oversight (The memo says councils and quangos will employ “trained internal financial investigators” and be “less reliant on more traditional law enforcement agencies, notably the police”)

- Bribe the many agencies you just set loose to go out and grab as much cash as they can

Presumably the next step is for the government to assert that having given these bodies a new revenue stream, it can make the vote-winning tax cuts they so desperately want before the next election. This plan  seems to be largely the work of the Performance and Innovation Unit of the Cabinet Office.

Note another recent scandalous expansion of powers via the back door – the use of strong anti-terrorism laws by councils to monitor people’s bin-filling habits or to find out what schools you want to send your kids to.

The authoritarian, intrusive police state measures pushed through by David Blunkett before his resignation are now being perverted by the current Home Secretary to let local unelected non-police bodies spy on civilians and tax ‘presumed ill-gotten gains’ so that they can now fund central government agencies and keep some as a finder’s fee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceeds_of_Crime_Act_2002

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6892830.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3588102/Criminal-proceedings.html

A Scenario:

This raises the possibility of the following scenario: Schedule 2 of POCA lists some of the crimes that count; alternatively, if you get convicted 3 times of ANY crime which you ‘benefit’ from, after three ‘strikes’ you are branded as leading a ‘criminal lifestyle’. Once branded as such, or committing an offence listed under Schedule 2 of POCA (as amendable by the Home Secretary by Statutory Instrument at any time he chooses to do so!!), a court will presume guilty any assets you can’t defend as legtimate (note the presumption of guilt – a heavy burden) and that for the 6 years following the start of proceedings against you, any gift you make will be deemed tainted – whether in connection to the offence or not.

This includes intellectual property offences. If you are convicted of video and music piracy, a body (authorised by the aforementioned SI) can intrude into every aspect of your life to investigate you. You cannot refuse any request for disclosure – you’ll be fined up to £5000 or get 6 months in jail.

It could then take you to court and seize any asset you cannot account legitimately for. If you cannot convince a court that, on the balance of probabilities, you haven’t illegally gained more than £5000 of benefit (that’s about 35gb of music+videos; most iPods sold today hold that much). And part of it is paid back to the agency as a bonus. A music label or the movie industry could then come along and sue you for damages on top of what the court took – which, I’ll remind you, was everything it presumed guilty but you couldn’t prove clean.

But that’s not all…

Scarily – and it’s not quite clear why this provision is there – the POCA allows investigators to operate totally anonymously, maintaining a secret identity and operating under a pseudonym. You will never know the name of your accuser. That draws some parallels to some fairly dark periods in human history.

Related:

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.