by Lee Griffin

So, let’s keep this short and simple. Tomorrow and Thursday the Coroners and Justice Bill enters its committee stage where two days are set aside to take evidence from all relevant parties and whittle the bill down to something that is likely to be sailed through the third reading stage. Fat chance, then, that we can expect any significant changes or removal of the absolutely awful changes to the data protection act; this is why it is extremely important that you keep writing to your MP (it’s a simple online form, takes 5 minutes) and tell them that you oppose any introduction of sections 152-154 of the Coroners and Justice bill.

For those that haven’t been following this, sections 152-154 allow any government minister, to allow the sharing of any personal information to whoever they wish. They can sell our data to foreign companies and governments, they can allow our tax and medical records to be accessible to whoever wishes to see them, they can even theoretically stop the press from publishing information about an individual. How can they do this? Sections 152-154 allow not only any government minister to share data, but to rewrite any law that exists to facilitate what they want to do for the purposes of sharing that data.



More ambiguously they can also create new offences based on the data being shared of which there are no safeguards to ensure that retrospective charging of an offence can’t happen. These 3 simple sections allow the government to throw away the data protection act, they allow the government to rewrite any law without more than a trivial vote on a statutory instrument (of which none have been voted against since at least the 1970’s), and they allow

Don’t let arguments that try to suggest the Government would never do anything bad with our personal information, or that even suggest this will enable the government to make our lives easier, fool you. Through all the good intentions in the world, this bill is so loosely worded that even if Labour did not abuse it until the end of their time in Government, it would only take an unscrupulous government with a fair majority to use it in the worst ways imaginable.

Write to your MP, urge them to lobby the MPs in the committee stage to remove sections 152-154, and to vote for any amendment at the third reading that does the same. The bill, otherwise, satisfies too many “good points” to stop Labour MPs from voting tribally to push it through regardless of if this abomination on our rights remains in it or not.