This article is spot on. Most of the Acts of Parliament that are passed these days are basically Enabling Acts, passing the power to Ministers (which in practice means civil servants) to govern by regulations, and giving the power to quangos to make laws and fine people for non-compliance, without reference to the courts.
Several examples spring to mind.
The first is the Electoral Commission, which has the power to fine people for breaking the election rules/law that it has created. (See Darren Grimes for an example of this.) The Information Commissioner has similar powers.
The second example is even more egregious: the RT website is blocked by internet service providers, having been added to a list of banned websites by the relevant Minister. The power to create a list of banned websites was itself taken by the Minister by issuing a regulation under the Sanctions and Money Laundering Act.
And the third example was of course the lockdowns. Many people think they were created by the Coronavirus Act, but they were in fact created by regulations issued by Matt Hancock under the Public Health Act. That Act (passed in 1984) was originally fairly innocuous but the regulatory powers were added in a frankly toxic amendment to it passed in 2008.
All this amounts to a brutal attack on our democracy itself, and in my opinion we are running out of time to save it.
No. There would be no basis to even bring a claim in the first place. There is no right to pay with cash that exists in English law and it is certainly not the role of courts to create one whole cloth. That’s why there would need to be legislation to in effect do so.
Good to know. So, top-down legislation it is, which makes my heart sink. Knowing nothing about how laws are made, may I ask how is "good" legislation made which accommodates the vast variety of situations in which payments are made, taking into consideration all the various needs of payers and payees?
As a follow-on thought, the proposed compulsory acceptance of cash for transactions less than £300 has an authoritarian tone, which surprised me. As did the qualification of applying only to physical retailers. That handily exempts your excellent substack. As a cash user, how do I pledge my support? Should I lobby our government to enforce this? Enforcement would mean you must allow cash subscribers. Lacking payment services such as direct debits, they occasionally forget to send you their packets of coins each month and you continually have to check if all your subs are up to date and manage delinquents. All those coins have to be counted to check you have not been short changed. And then there are the non-Stirling coins. I don’t blame you and you are not alone. Even the pro-cash campaign group, cashisfreedom.uk, does not offer cash as an option for its paying supporters. It does seem sometimes that cash is something we want other people to have access to.
Well - yes. That's exactly right. Cash is something I want other people to have access to, if they want/need to use it. I'm not suggesting, to be clear, that retailers should be forced not to accept digital payments. I'm suggesting that there needs to be a right to pay with cash; in the fantasy world in which anybody listens to my ideas, I assume that most retail transactions would in fact still be paid for by card, as they are currently.
Yes, agreed. What you are making me think about is that by granting a right for people to be able to pay with cash, that simultaneously confers a duty on others, all the paraphernalia for handling cash. It doesn't feel like a right, such as the right to life, just a good old government regulation. And as cash becomes more marginalised, in the limit zero cash transactions, the cost to retailers of compliance with government regulation outweighs the benefit. Is that a tyranny of a minority? Could the free market decide instead? Is it the bullying behaviour of Visa that needs prohibiting instead? What protections could/should be offered for cash users, and on the other side of the bargain, for retailers?
If the government really wanted to show willing it could provide tax breaks for cash transactions. That would offset the inconvenience (and therefore cost) to businesses. Would that be preferable to legislation?
I'm in general not a fan of Gordon Brownish tinkering of that kind - the State should preferably make clear rules and leave the rest of us to it. In a sense, though, the point is moot, because the government won't do anything meaningful to ensure cash remains a viable payment method; the subtext to all of this is that our political class really does just want to abolish physical money.
I think I can safely say that the people are facing a global conspiracy by the (pseudo) elites.
It simply won't happen. Their pride will be their downfall. The madmen who think they're God will never be able to wipe out from human memory the physical medium (whatever it may be: gold, silver, shells, etc.) which serves as a means of payment for trade and other exchanges, and which has existed since mankind first stood on its own feet.
In France, we have a saying: "Beware of sleeping water."
People are like big animals, rather calm when left alone. The proud would do well to remember that.
Another bingo, David. In the People's Republic of Canadia, we just witnessed how easily the whole Charter of Rights could be abridged simply due to the initial statement as to the guarantee of rights, that it is "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." There's that word "reasonable." Now add that to "demonstrably justified," and the Charter was rendered a joke. In a world where we can confuse basic gender categories, accuse math of being racist, consider plagiarism a mere technicality, refer to riots as mostly peaceful demonstrations, and so on, the ideas of "reasonable" and "demonstrably justified," are the sort of thing to make tyrants salivate.
This article is spot on. Most of the Acts of Parliament that are passed these days are basically Enabling Acts, passing the power to Ministers (which in practice means civil servants) to govern by regulations, and giving the power to quangos to make laws and fine people for non-compliance, without reference to the courts.
Several examples spring to mind.
The first is the Electoral Commission, which has the power to fine people for breaking the election rules/law that it has created. (See Darren Grimes for an example of this.) The Information Commissioner has similar powers.
The second example is even more egregious: the RT website is blocked by internet service providers, having been added to a list of banned websites by the relevant Minister. The power to create a list of banned websites was itself taken by the Minister by issuing a regulation under the Sanctions and Money Laundering Act.
And the third example was of course the lockdowns. Many people think they were created by the Coronavirus Act, but they were in fact created by regulations issued by Matt Hancock under the Public Health Act. That Act (passed in 1984) was originally fairly innocuous but the regulatory powers were added in a frankly toxic amendment to it passed in 2008.
All this amounts to a brutal attack on our democracy itself, and in my opinion we are running out of time to save it.
Could the common law save (physical) cash? What might a hypothetical case be out of which came a judgment that retailers must accept payment in cash?
No. There would be no basis to even bring a claim in the first place. There is no right to pay with cash that exists in English law and it is certainly not the role of courts to create one whole cloth. That’s why there would need to be legislation to in effect do so.
Good to know. So, top-down legislation it is, which makes my heart sink. Knowing nothing about how laws are made, may I ask how is "good" legislation made which accommodates the vast variety of situations in which payments are made, taking into consideration all the various needs of payers and payees?
As a follow-on thought, the proposed compulsory acceptance of cash for transactions less than £300 has an authoritarian tone, which surprised me. As did the qualification of applying only to physical retailers. That handily exempts your excellent substack. As a cash user, how do I pledge my support? Should I lobby our government to enforce this? Enforcement would mean you must allow cash subscribers. Lacking payment services such as direct debits, they occasionally forget to send you their packets of coins each month and you continually have to check if all your subs are up to date and manage delinquents. All those coins have to be counted to check you have not been short changed. And then there are the non-Stirling coins. I don’t blame you and you are not alone. Even the pro-cash campaign group, cashisfreedom.uk, does not offer cash as an option for its paying supporters. It does seem sometimes that cash is something we want other people to have access to.
Well - yes. That's exactly right. Cash is something I want other people to have access to, if they want/need to use it. I'm not suggesting, to be clear, that retailers should be forced not to accept digital payments. I'm suggesting that there needs to be a right to pay with cash; in the fantasy world in which anybody listens to my ideas, I assume that most retail transactions would in fact still be paid for by card, as they are currently.
Yes, agreed. What you are making me think about is that by granting a right for people to be able to pay with cash, that simultaneously confers a duty on others, all the paraphernalia for handling cash. It doesn't feel like a right, such as the right to life, just a good old government regulation. And as cash becomes more marginalised, in the limit zero cash transactions, the cost to retailers of compliance with government regulation outweighs the benefit. Is that a tyranny of a minority? Could the free market decide instead? Is it the bullying behaviour of Visa that needs prohibiting instead? What protections could/should be offered for cash users, and on the other side of the bargain, for retailers?
If the government really wanted to show willing it could provide tax breaks for cash transactions. That would offset the inconvenience (and therefore cost) to businesses. Would that be preferable to legislation?
I'm in general not a fan of Gordon Brownish tinkering of that kind - the State should preferably make clear rules and leave the rest of us to it. In a sense, though, the point is moot, because the government won't do anything meaningful to ensure cash remains a viable payment method; the subtext to all of this is that our political class really does just want to abolish physical money.
I think I can safely say that the people are facing a global conspiracy by the (pseudo) elites.
It simply won't happen. Their pride will be their downfall. The madmen who think they're God will never be able to wipe out from human memory the physical medium (whatever it may be: gold, silver, shells, etc.) which serves as a means of payment for trade and other exchanges, and which has existed since mankind first stood on its own feet.
In France, we have a saying: "Beware of sleeping water."
People are like big animals, rather calm when left alone. The proud would do well to remember that.
Brake, brake.
Another bingo, David. In the People's Republic of Canadia, we just witnessed how easily the whole Charter of Rights could be abridged simply due to the initial statement as to the guarantee of rights, that it is "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." There's that word "reasonable." Now add that to "demonstrably justified," and the Charter was rendered a joke. In a world where we can confuse basic gender categories, accuse math of being racist, consider plagiarism a mere technicality, refer to riots as mostly peaceful demonstrations, and so on, the ideas of "reasonable" and "demonstrably justified," are the sort of thing to make tyrants salivate.