Despite our ever-growing number of laws, this country is becoming increasingly lawless

Telegraph

2 days ago

Ronan's Law came into effect on Friday. Ninja swords, straight-bladed and lethal, may no longer be sold, bought or owned. The statute is named after Ronan Kanda, horribly murdered by such a weapon in Wolverhampton in 2022. It followed a campaign led by Ronan's mother, who wanted to memorialise her son in a practical way.
What I am about to write may sound cold-hearted, but I think it needs saying. After such tragedies, the bereaved deserve our sympathy and our support; but they should not be treated as arbiters of what happens next. Modern civilisation rests on the idea that victims do not sit in judgment, and that principle extends to law-making. There is a reason that justice wears a blindfold.
In our impatient, screen-addled era, the blindfold is frequently ripped away. Abstract precepts give way to human sympathies and prejudices. Naming laws after victims, a trend that began some 30 years ago in the United States, is perhaps the clearest symptom of our increasingly arbitrary approach to law-making.
Ronan's Law is by no means the most egregious example, but it will serve. Attempts to criminalise certain kinds of blade, as opposed to certain kinds of behaviour, have never had much effect. Prohibit a particular design and small changes will allow a legal version. The fashion for ninja swords was itself a response to previous bans on machetes, zombie knives and disguised blades.
Criminals can always turn everyday items into weapons. Yet the idea that banning certain types of knife will save lives (or 'countless lives' as the BBC report on Ronan's Law puts it) has an enduring appeal. It is more pleasant, at any rate, than confronting the possibility that the surge in stabbings might be rooted in cultural or demographic changes.
Ronan's Law, which follows Scott's Law and Damian's Law (campaigns named after two other knife-crime fatalities), is now on the statute book. Who knows, it might even have an impact. But the precedents are not encouraging. Laws named after victims – apostrophe laws, as they are known – tend to have unintended consequences, precisely because they are pushed through with much moralising and little analysis.
Take Sarah's Law, which allows for the identification of people with child abuse records. The campaign for that change set off a wave of vigilantism. At one point, a mob in South Wales attacked the home of a paediatrician, whose job title they had misunderstood.
Or take Martyn's Law, named after a victim of the Manchester Arena bombing. Instead of tackling the root cause of that abomination, Martyn's Law requires public venues to implement anti-terrorism measures. Small music venues and village halls must have protocols in place to protect their customers from bombers. One casualty is the Shrewsbury Flower Show, the world's longest-running, which was supposed to have been held next weekend, its 150th anniversary, but has been cancelled in part because it cannot afford the compliance costs.
There are proposals for a 'Hillsborough Law' to impose a duty of full disclosure on public bodies – with, once again, victims' families being treated as the judges of whether ministers are doing enough.
There were even calls, following the murder of David Amess, for a 'David's Law' that would crack down on online abuse against MPs – as if Twitter, rather than Islamist terrorism, had killed him. In the fevered atmosphere that follows such a horror, truly outlandish ideas are entertained.
It is tempting to blame politicians for these kneejerk measures. But, in a democracy, that is something of a cop out. I remember talking to an MP when the Online Harms Bill was first introduced. 'We both know how this is going to end,' I told her. 'These bans are sold as being about terrorism, but they never stop there.'
'That's easy for you to say,' she replied, sadly. 'You don't have voters to worry about at your end.' She had a point. Those who are now raging about the restrictions were, with some honourable exceptions, quiet during the passage of the legislation. MPs who spoke against it tended to be howled down as friends of child abusers (one such, though she gets surprisingly little recognition for it, was Kemi Badenoch).
The Online Harms Bill might not have been eponymous, but it was a product of the same emotional, safetyist, nannying political culture as the apostrophe laws – hence the change in its name from the Online Harms Bill to the Online Safety Bill. Indeed, it is covered by a different apostrophe law, Lovejoy's Law, named after the vicar's wife from The Simpsons who repeatedly interrupts a political meeting by demanding, in support of contradictory positions, 'Oh won't somebody think of the children?'
Lovejoy's Law holds that anyone who claims a monopoly on caring about children has a weak case. If your argument stands on its logic, you don't have to preface it with 'Speaking as a parent…' If the legal change you want is robust, you don't need to name it after anyone. But that point is hard to make in our emotionally incontinent age.
Laws should be a last rather than a first resort. 'Corruptissima republica plurimae leges,' wrote Tacitus: the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state. Yet we increasingly demand that our MPs legislate to send messages, signal disapproval or appear active – and then turn on those MPs when the consequences become evident.
It is not a new phenomenon. As a teenager, I watched in astonishment as a previous Conservative Government passed such obviously absurd measures as the Football Spectators Act (1989), which required fans to carry identity cards, and the Dangerous Dogs Act (1991) which condemned dogs on the basis of their appearance rather than their behaviour. Even then, I was uncomfortable with the bullying way in which the changes were driven through. Don't you care about the Hillsborough victims? Do you want kids to be savaged by pit bulls? Oh, won't somebody think of the children?
Not that the 'think of the children' crowd do much thinking. One of the difficulties that organisations that work with children face is the hassle of requiring every volunteer to be vetted – a requirement that has its roots in the 1990s, when social workers around the country somehow convinced themselves that a shadowy network of powerful figures was using children in Satanic rituals. The moral panic passed, but the bureaucratic inconvenience remains.
And that change was before 24-hour news channels, let alone the Internet. In our current political culture, it is almost impossible for a politician to respond to some scandal by saying, 'this is amply covered by existing laws', or 'it was an unforeseeable breakdown that no regulation could realistically have prevented'. No, it is easier by far to say, 'I shall impose new guidelines to Ensure This Never Happens Again'. Thus the pile of laws grows higher and higher.
In 1949, Winston Churchill told MPs, 'If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law'. Since then, we have had more than 100,000 statutory instruments alone. Yet none of it seems to slake our thirst for yet more legislation.
The ultimate example was, of course, the pandemic, when the country demanded stringent measures, and railed against Boris Johnson for his hands-off libertarianism. Needless to say, voters do not like the effects of these measures: the price rises and tax rises, the surge in welfare claims, the absenteeism, the poor public services. But it was a brave politician (or even, ahem, newspaper columnist) who stood in the path of the authoritarian mob in March 2020.
We say that we want politicians who tell us the truth, but we vote for those who parrot our prejudices. We declare our love of freedom, but we demand crackdowns. We imagine that we deal in facts, but we fall for human-interest stories presented through soft camera lenses and slow piano music. The fact is that democracies get the laws they deserve. Call it Daniel's Law.