Talk of a 'Great Repeal Bill' to roll back the tide of legislation and new governmental power brought us by both this government and its forerunners has come from several different quarters recently. The Liberal Democrats have a Freedom Bill ready, cast in full legislative language. OurKingdom's own Anthony Barnett used the term 'Great Repeal Bill' to suggest a publicly-drafted set of proposals that could be put to parliamentary candidates in order to get them on record about which they supported. Now Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan - whose haranguing of Gordon Brown famously went viral this spring - and MP Douglas Carswell have created a wiki of the same name, soliciting suggestions from "ordinary citizens" (alongside a "guarded" version being run in parallel).
There is no requirement that these ordinary citizens be Conservatives, but - unsurprisingly, given the project's launch on ConservativeHome - the proposals so far have a decidedly Tory bent. Among the restrictions of liberty they would do away with are employee-friendly regulations on business and old Eurosceptic bugbears like the imposition of the metric system. The legislation that would be repealed include the acts that give force to the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties. The Hunting Act and Parliament Acts would find themselves on the chopping block, as would requirements that planning decisions be taken "with the objective of contributing to the achievement of sustainable development" (which appear to be entirely toothless anyway).
That said, it is no bad thing to have a libertarian critique from the right. 'Liberty' issues typically involve trade-offs, and left-wingers who fight against the idea of trading liberty for security are sometimes slow to see that their own schemes for promoting progressive policy aims carry a similar cost. There is also a set of issues involving intrusive regulations - even banal ones like those requiring the production of Home Information Packs, which the wiki's users would do away with - that are not classic civil liberty issues, but have a clear connection to a freedom-maximising agenda, and are more typically a Conservative concern. It is good to be reminded of them too.
So OurKingdom readers left and right could benefit from examining Hannan and Carswell's wiki - and even, given its ostensibly open nature, contributing to it.
PS: The original idea of a Great Repeal Bill was set out in The Plan, by Carswell and Hannan.