They are not fines - so thats fine
A reasonable précis of the arguments, Mr Booker is a little wrong on the Justice Laws ruling, which was that firstly there was a hierarchy of acts of parliament and secondly “constitutional statutes” could not be changed by implication.
Government officials across the land will have heaved a sigh of relief last week at a High Court ruling by Mr Justice Andrew Collins, which gives them the power to impose arbitrary penalties on the public without having to justify them in a court of law.
Robin de Crittenden is the
The implications of this case were enormous, because not only are 7 million of these fines imposed each year on motorists, but other branches of government have in recent years exploited the same system by introducing automatic penalties for a range of offences, such as the late return of forms or taxes.
Mr Justice Collins cut through all this confusion by the simple device of ruling that a “penalty” is not a “fine” or “forfeiture”. No matter that the dictionary defines a fine as “a monetary penalty”, a forfeit as “a fine” or “penalty” and a penalty as “a fine”, the good judge clearly belongs to the Humpty Dumpty school of lawmaking, based on the principle “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean”.
Not only does this ruling retrospectively save councils tens of million of pounds, it also vastly increases the powers of officialdom to levy penalties for anything that offends them, by taking away the citizen’s right to challenge them.
Maybe David Cameron has a point in claiming that we need a new Bill of Rights, because clearly the old one, on the say-so of Mr Justice Collins, has just been chucked in the bin.
Yet it is only four years since Lord Justice Laws found the “metric martyrs” guilty on the grounds that certain Acts of Parliament, including the Bill of Rights and the European Communities Act, were “constitutional statutes” so fundamental to our law that they could not be subsequently overruled.
