26 November 2006: the law is an Eeyore

How many times has the law regarding the labelling of honey in England and Wales been changed since 1997? Four times: by Statutory Instrument [SI] 2003/2243, followed by SI 2003/1920, SI 2003/2044 and (most recently) SI 2005/3052. The last of these helpfully reads 'In Schedule 1, Note 1, for the words "and 6" substitute "6 and 7".' That's all it says: all.

Statutory instruments are secondary legislation. At times, they have been well scrutinised by Parliament. With their proliferation, that task has become harder. In the 1940s, Labour rebel John Platt-Mills sat on a parliamentary committee, whose sole function was to vet SIs before they were introduced (or 'made') by the government. How could any committee reasonably check four or five thousand SIs each year?

The labelling of honey is a modest enough example, but other SIs are of real importance. Take another example: the Work and Families Act 2006: an act whose primary effect is to increase the length of statutory maternity pay for mothers. Unnoticed by the press or parliament, the same Act also gives ministers the power to increase (or reduce) the statutory holiday entitlement of all workers in England and Wales.

As the executive takes power from parliament, so the passing of secondary legislation becomes more and more important: it is in the Regulations, rather than in Statutes, that the detail of legislation can be found. But no-one scrutinises the Regulations. No-one controls the law.

Ask a teacher how many government initiatives there have been since 1997: any list of the major changes would get quickly into double figures. specialist schools, City academies, reading hours, faith schools, the AS-level, changes to teachers' salaries, changes to pensions, tougher Ofsted regimes followed by looser Ofsted rules, new curricula, new roles for classroom assistants, streaming, partial independence from local authorities, rules supposedly limiting class sizes.

Everything is changed and nothing is changed, and when anything does change it only seems to change for the worse.

Of course it's possible to run a completely different education system, but the hyperactivity of initiatives corresponds to a narrowing of the political space. Important trends in British education - for example, the rapid increased in the number of students attending private schools, and with that the draining of resources from the state sector - become ones that educators are barely allowed to discuss.

A paradox: when historians look back at this government, they will undoubtedly judge it to have been the most active force for introducing new legislation in all of British history (to date). Tony Blair has presided over more individual items of primary and secondary legislation than perhaps the previous half-dozen prime ministers combined.

But, for all this activity, what reforms have been done?

The greater the activity of the government, the less choice that people feel in their lives. It's Big Tent politics, the Third Way.