Transcript

IAIN GRAY

So I’ve had experience of new legislation from different angles. I mean, I’ve been a minister with legislation trying to get it through the Parliament, and I’ve been a member of a committee looking at legislation, a member of the bigger Parliament when in the final stages the whole Parliament looks at legislation.

And one of the things which I think strikes you about all of that is how varied the subjects are that you’ll be required to deal with legislation on. It may be anything from, well, we considered legislation the other day in docking puppy dogs tails and then in the same week we were looking at legislation to change the British transport police and make them part of Police Scotland.

I mean it can be incredibly varied, even day-to-day, and so over the years, I think I’ve probably had to deal with legislation about just about anything that you could think of. But you know, that’s one of the things that keeps the job interesting.

One of the pieces of legislation that I am most proud of was very early in my career as a parliamentarian, right back at the start of the Scottish Parliament. I was responsible for a piece of legislation called Adults with Incapacity. It set up the system whereby, if someone is disabled or perhaps has an illness like dementia, and they can’t take decisions for themselves anymore, how their family or someone else can be able to take decisions for them and to help them with their everyday life.

And one of the things which I think was unusual about that legislation was that, one of the reasons we needed it was that the laws which were being applied, some of them were 500 years old. And so it was a new bit of legislation to get rid of something that somebody had passed 500 years before.

When you are scrutinising legislation, you bring to that the values that you bring to being a parliamentarian, and those are fundamentally, I think, about fairness. I mean, the law as a system is designed to try and make sure that we’re all treated fairly. You know, we have that phrase, equal under the law. Nobody’s above the law.

And so I think a fundamental principle that parliamentarians have to be trying to apply is that principle of fairness. Does this make our country fairer or less fair? And fairer is where we should be aiming for.

Even over the 20 years that I’ve been involved in this process as a parliamentarian, I think that the language of our legislation probably has got a little more straightforward. But you know it would be kidding people really to suggest that laws are usually written in plain everyday English.

Somebody has to sit down and actually draft a law, write it out. And that’s quite a highly skilled job. And there’s not many of them in Scotland who can do it. And they do have their own rules about it.

So sometimes when you look at a piece of legislation, it does look as if the language is kind of deliberately complicated or convoluted or old and archaic. But actually, it will be like that for a good reason, because you know, a word out of place can change the meaning of the law. And if you only find that out later when somebody ends up in court, and it wasn’t what you meant, then it’s kind of too late to fix it then. So I think the language is getting a bit more accessible. But if I’m honest, laws are never going to be written in simple everyday English.