There is much in the coming parliamentary programme to trouble civil liberties-minded lawyers, says Jon Robins
At the end of the day it wasn’t so much what was in the Queen’s Speech at the end of last month, but what was left out. The much-trumpeted plan to ditch the Human Rights Act— “as raw a hunk of red meat” as most right-wingers could hope for, as The Daily Telegraph put it—was put back on ice.
In her speech opening the new parliamentary session, the Queen announced the new Conservative government would “bring forward proposals for a British Bill of Rights”— a significant retreat from their previous promise to disentangle the Gordian knot of Human Rights Act repeal within the first 100 days if the new government.
Despite that temporary reprieve, there is much in the coming parliamentary programme to trouble civil liberties-minded lawyers—an investigatory powers bill, reprising “the snooper’s charter”, allowing for the retention of records of phone calls, e-mails and other data; an extremism bill including new-style ‘extremism disruption orders’ to tackle those preachers of hate trying to radicalise our youth; and an immigration bill
