Something you notice as you get older is that new laws appear and you think "how come we don't already have a law against this?".
Then you do a little Googling and find that actually, we already do. Or at least, there are things in other laws that allow you to achieve the same objective of the new law.
Such is the announcement of the government introducing a law that would criminalise families that forced their children into a marriage.
The law is unnecessary. A person in this country can refuse to marry in the registry office. Marriages can be annulled because of undue pressure. So, the only way to get them to marry is to take them abroad against their will to less civilised countries. At which point, we have laws against kidnapping. Or if taken to a country and told to marry and that they can't return, we have false imprisonment laws. We even have a Forced Marriage Unit that rescues people that have been forced into marriages abroad.
So, why is the government wasting a whole lot of time and money on a law that's unnecessary? The government's own explanation, of making it clear to families that forced marriage is against the law, as though a family that has to evade British law to get someone to marry hasn't worked this out. Fact is that the families know it's not legal, but have already made their mind up that the government can go to Hell and they'll do it anyway.
So, what's the law really about? What it's really about is creating a positive story for the government, something vaguely about upholding British justice, something that will make the public less likely to think that Fred Karno's Army are running the country.
In terms of outcomes, it makes no difference, as we already have all the laws we need. Arguably, we'd be better not having this law with its consultation, civil servants drafting, redrafting and so forth (all of which costs an eye-watering amount of money) and instead hiring a few more people at the Forced Marriage Unit to rescue women from forced marriages and prosecute those involved in it.
No scrumping
5 hours ago
6 comments:
Very reminiscent of the good old nuLabor days, knee jerk and poorly drafted legislation, as well as the "see we're doing something about it" laws.
When all they had to do was enforce the statutes we already had.
So nothing new really.
Anecdotal:
I once had a Pakistani lass live in my house who had recently had twin babies. The father was also a Pakistani but of whom Her Parents Did Not Approve (i.e. she had a fling with the butcher's lad).
The lass herself was very intelligent (in her early twenties, had been to university, had a reasonably good job) and had an enjoyably misanthropic view of other people and life in general.
Her parents had more or less disowned her (which is why she came to be living at mine, a mutual friend just dumped her on my door step, and being a bit of a soft touch, I let her and her twins move in, pending).
After a month or two (and she did discuss her 'options' with me), she just caved in to her parents, she gave the twins to their father's family to look adopt/look after (I got the impression he was a very loving dad in a faintly violent way) and she moved back to her parents, it being agreed that the official explanation for her absence was that she'd been on holiday abroad for the missing six months.
That sort of familial pressure and desire to conform is more or less unimaginable to any civilised white person born after about 1950. But to them it is normal, and until these girls (or indeed boys) wake up and smell the coffee and realise that there is a whole world out there, no amount of legislation is going to make very much difference.
Just sayin' is all.
BB,
"So nothing new really."
Well, no. The result of the FPTP system is that most of the time, you get very similar parties.
As Mark Wadsworth astutely observes in his pieces about Indian Bicycle Marketing, the main difference is in the marketing. The insults thrown by both sides create a false impression of a genuine philosophical war between parties of big and small government that serve those 2 parties far better than it serves us.
Mark,
One of the successes of immigration of the 1960s and 1970s was that governments adopted policies of integration rather than multiculturalism. Getting on meant broadly, becoming British.
The result of this is that by the mid-80s, arranged marriage (with a lot of parental pressure rather than matchmaking) was pretty much over in Hindu and Sikh community. I've got quite a few Sikh friends and none of them had arranged marriages.
At the same time, no-one said that they couldn't be Sikh, eat curries or watch awful musicals.
Bravo. Excellent summary.
BB, yes, the point about there being little use in passing new legislation if you don't enforce the legislation you've got is rather lost on politicians. OTOH, if you don't keep making up legislation then there would be nothing for rather too many civil servants to do.
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