One of the more tiresome ways of our legislators is their habit of changing law through the use of amendment clauses. You know the sort of thing: instead of rewriting the clause from scratch, and presenting it in its entirety, we have ‘In section 650 of the National Health Service Act 2006 (Chapter 5A of Part 2: interpretation) (the existing text of which becomes subsection (1)) at the end, insert—’, the end result of which is a serpentine spaghetti of words so convoluted that the eyes glaze over and the temples throb. Never mind that the apparent zero after 65 is in fact the letter ‘O’, or that the said Act 2006 appears in fact to be said Act 2009; the fog generated while trying to cobble together the parts to make an intelligible whole is a masterpiece of Sir Humphreian obfuscation.
