Laying down the law locally

摘要

For most of us, the chief value of byelaws is to remind us of phenomena never otherwise encountered in our modern lives - hawkers, peddlers, vehicular parks, offensive accumulations, verminous persons. For overseas visitors, though, byelaws are among their first encounters with our governmental authority, and they can be both bemused and confused. They wonder why the only literature in their taxis is a listing of the obligations of 'Hackney carriage proprietors'. They read street notices announcing penalties for numerous imaginable and unimaginable offences, from littering, dog fouling, playing 'tipcat and other dangerous games', to carrying soot, driving unsecured bulls (important, if your city is centred on a bull ring), and unauthorised erections (buildings, in case you were wondering). These visitors pop, as one does, into libraries, art galleries, tattooists and knackers' yards, and everywhere there are these byelaws - all apparently made, in our case, by Birmingham City Council. And they naturally deduce that the city is an albeit large, but really rather cuddly, self-governing community, with our elected burghers legislating away at their own discretion for, as the 1972 Local Government Act puts it, our 'good rule and government' and 'the prevention and suppression of nuisances'. Whereupon I have to disabuse them with the news that this byelaw making is a purely delegated power and in fact evidence of a local government system so comprehensively centrally controlled as to be to them almost incredible.