The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #55500 Message #880202
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
01-Feb-03 - 03:55 PM
Thread Name: PELs: Exemptions?
Subject: RE: PELs: Exemptions?
Sorry, but this is a longish post. It's a complicated issue - and at least I have broken it up into paragraphs to make it easier to read.
The trouble is when you read the actual Bill - and here it is - pretty well all those things actually are open to prosecution. We keep on getting airy announcements that of course "this" isn't going to happen, and "that" isn't going to happen. But the words of the Bill are what counts, and the words of the Bill are, at the very least, open to those interpretations.
It would be very easy indeed for Howells and company to put exemptions in the Bill that would make certain that the activities which they say should not be adversely affected will not be adversely affected. But so far they have refused to do so - except in the case of churches, where they upset too many of the wrong people. (Having initially dismissed their objections as nonsensical scaremongering.)
And even when they have come out with what look like firm promises, we then find them twisting round the meaning of the English language to allow them to escape. For example read this post which I made on another thread. It shows how what looked like an "absolutely" firm promise to exempt sessions and so forth from licensing requirments has been turned into the reverse by means of a thoroughly dishonest quasi-logical trick of the department's devising.
As for whether it will really make things worse in practice, we'll find out. But this is the "reform" that was supposed to make a pretty unsatisfactory situation better, and it could so easily have done this - still could with a few simple amendments. But instead, here we are worrying over how far it's going to be worse.
And there are real reasons for thinking it will make things worse. Up until now a lot of the stuff we have been doing has been in a grey area. All right, we were going over the two-in-a-bar limit in pubs often enough - but then that was an exemption, not a limit. Two-in-a-bar meant that two-in-a-bar was defintely legal, but it has never been too clear what under what circumstances more than two was illegal, and the same went for Morris Dancers and so forth, and for activities in other places than pubs.
But now the law is frighteningly clear - virtually any musical or dramatic performance anywhere which is open to the public which is not covered by a licence is going to be defined in law as a criminal offence. And that is not exaggeration, it is what the Bill says, and what the Act will say if it is not altered.
And when I say that you need to be naive to believe that letter from MPs, I'm not suggesting that everybody ought to know the ins and outs of these strange things we go in for. But I am perhaps implying that anyone who lives in our society should surely know by now that you cannot just trust the people we employ to govern us, and assume they are telling the truth. You always have to check and double check, and look out for the omissions and the ambiguities.
The journalist Claude Cockburn used to say the basic rule for interviewing anyone important was "Why is this lying
bastard lying to me?" (Jeremy Paxman is said to have tghsi as a favourite maxim, which is why I wish so much he could get Kim Howells in front of him.) I think we should all have that question in mind any time we get a letter from a government department or from a minister, or read an article or a press release or hear a broadcast.
No hard feelings, but - "Why is this lying bastard lying to us?"