This week

Interventions in the House this week: Immigration service http://bit.ly/10bjyCB Temporary stop notices http://bit.ly/12dBEjy Assault on Nigella Lawson http://bit.ly/19qZ5wg Other events: 08.30 Tuesday: meeting of the APPG on Child Health & Vaccine Preventable Diseases, of which I’m co-chair. 08.30 Wednesday: meeting of the APPG on the Nuclear Industry to hear from Candu about their proposals for burning the 100+ tonnes of plutonium stored at Sellafield There are so many All-Party Groups nowadays that it is impossible to fit the meetings into civilised hours of working! Wednesday pm Select Committee on Statutory Instruments: an enormous mass of documents, dealt with in about a minute. The purpose of the exercise is merely to approve criticisms of the drafting of SIs by the clerks. The Committee itself never pinpoints drafting errors that had escaped the eagle-eyed scrutiny by the clerks, making it a nugatory exercise. But even reading the several hundred pages thoroughly would take weeks. There is far too much secondary legislation, much of it verging on incomprehensibility, yet the need for precision in the law dealing with situations that are extremely complex forces the wording in that direction.