Labour: Incompetant Legislator

If there was any better indication of how poor the Labour party is at drafting legislation, this is it.

A 19 year old Canadian woman woman who married a British man is due to be deported under laws intended to prevent forced marriages. She won't be able to return until she's 21, which is the age stimpulated by the law.

The fact that a law drafted so widely that it catches someone patently not forced into marriage shows its bad law. The law should be targetted specifically at the activity its aimed at.

There are several points raised by this and other Labour-introduced legislation.

1. The inability of either house in Parliament to reject or modify this law before introduction to make it more focussed.

2. The complexity of age limits around laws enacted by Labour. We have the nonsense of age limits of anywhere between 16 and 21 defining when a person is legally able to engage in a variety of activities, leading to confusion. We have nonsensical situations where a person is able to get married and have sex, but not smoke and drink, where a soldier can fight and die on the soil of a different country, but can't marry one of the people he is protecting and bring her back home to the UK.

3. We have legislation enacted with this law and others (PACE, RIPA, CJ&I Act, etc) which is so wide ranging it impedes on what should be legal activity.

New Labour have enacted over 3000 new laws. I wonder how many of those are as poorly crafted? I also wonder how many will be repealed by the next government.