All laws to be written in plain English?

Harriet Harman’s campaign against ‘lawyer-speak’

Harriet Harman has got herself back in the news by doing something rather good. She is the minister for constitutional affairs and last week introduced legislation which is more notable for the way in which it is drafted than for the change to the law it effects.

The Bill in question is quite remarkable, for it is written in something called ‘plain English’, which is what we all used to speak before the lawyers somehow attained their total cultural, political and linguistic hegemony over the rest of us at some point towards the end of the last century. Actually, the Bill is written in two languages: there’s that hideous, ubiquitous thing, lawyer-speak, on one side of the page and a translation into ‘plain English’ on the other side. You may be inclined to ask, why bother with the lawyer-speak at all, if the Bill already exists, de facto, in a language all of us can understand. And further to that, how long will it be before some weasel-faced lawyer insists that there is a discrepancy — or perhaps merely the shimmering of daylight — between the legalese and the plain English translation? And which version will take precedence in a court of law?

In fairness to Ms Harman, she has thought about this. She thinks that maybe in future Bills should be written only in plain English — an excellent idea and one which, hopefully, will see a large number of law firms traipsing towards the bankruptcy courts. I know Ms Harman thinks this, because she said as much while being interviewed on the BBC’s Sunday AM programme, wherein Andrew Marr attempts to look engaged and interested as he talks to Ian Wright about football, or to the gorgeous, pouting Katie Melua about how horrible it is that there are starving people in the world and all those wars and stuff.