The more you do some things, the worse the results — the task goes from being easy to difficult to downright impossible. Making your house more comfortable by adding furniture to it is an example. Another, perhaps less obvious example, is making laws.

Imagine all possible laws, ranked from the obviously good ones through to the borderline cases and down to the absurd and the atrocious. A sensible legislature will start at the top, enacting the best laws first, and progress steadily down the list until it arrives at the borderline cases. Then its lawmaking will slow down, because it is difficult to identify the few remaining possibilities that are on the right side of the borderline. And eventually the legislating will stop. By continuing, only bad laws would be enacted.

This is an idealisation, of course. In reality new opportunities for good legislation will continue to arise from time to time. But the basic point survives. Good laws are limited in number. Any half-decent legislature, such as Britain has possessed for well over a century, will enact most of them in its early years. If it is to avoid heaping bad laws on top of good, its rate of lawmaking must decline over time.

But as the Queen's Speech today will remind us, this is is the opposite of what has happened. As time goes by our MPs pass an ever-increasing quantity of legislation. In 1960 just under 4,000 pages of legislation were created. By 2006 the number had climbed to 15,000. Add in EU regulations and we are now running at more than 25,000 new pages of legislation a year.

To believe that we benefit from this ceaseless torrent of legislation, you would have to think that Britain is severely under-regulated. But that is an incredible idea. A British business must comply with 170,000 pages of EU regulation. Can that really be too few? This Labour Government has created 3,000 new offences. Does anyone honestly believe that in 1997 we were thousands of offences shy of the proper total?

When no amount of prior regulation reduces the quantity of subsequent regulation, it is clear that politicians' incentives to legislate are disconnected from any good that their laws might do. How can this preposterous situation be remedied?

An attempt is currently before New Zealand's Parliament. The Regulatory Responsibility Bill aims to improve the quality of legislation by specifying principles of responsible regulation and requiring the sponsor of any new Bill to report on its compliance with these principles.

The principles are simple and uncontroversial but still sufficient to rule out most recent British legislation. For example, one states that legislation should not diminish the rule of law by creating uncertainty as to whether actions are lawful. That would dispose of Britain's “incitement to hatred” laws. Another states that legislation should not diminish freedom of contract. That would rule out most employment legislation, which is little more than a conspiracy against freedom of contract. And the principle that a Bill should not be passed into law if its goal could better be achieved without it would do for almost all other legislation of recent years.

Alas, the Bill does not go far enough. It provides no extra-parliamentary mechanism for ensuring adherence to its principles, explicitly ruling out judicial review. The shame of publishing a report about their misguided, principles-violating legislation is supposed to keep politicians honest.

This is wishful thinking. We would get no such admissions from MPs but only sophistical misrepresentations. Allowing politicians to determine whether they have violated the principles of responsible regulation is like allowing burglars to judge whether they have broken into your house. There is no point in expecting politicians to regulate responsibly, even if they promise to. The pressure to “do something” and the temptation to win votes by bestowing regulatory favours on politically influential groups will always overwhelm them. The only hope for improving lawmaking in a democracy is to prevent elected politicians from doing it. That may sound crazy but Britain's successful regime for setting interest rates shows how it might work.

The Bank of England was granted independence to set interest rates because politicians could not be relied upon to do so responsibly. The temptation to set rates for short-term political gain rather than long-term economic stability would always get the better of them. Since this temptation arises not only when setting interest rates but also when regulating more generally, why not apply the solution more generally?

Politicians' legislating powers should be transferred to an independent panel of experts. Elected politicians should specify the principles guiding responsible legislation, such as those contained in New Zealand's Bill. And, just as the Government now tells the Bank of England the target inflation rate, the elected government should submit its policies to the expert panel for legislative implementation.

When these policies cannot be implemented without violating the guiding principles, the experts should be legally obliged to “send them back”. Politicians would then be forced to choose between changing the guiding principles and changing their policies. By making such trade-offs explicit, this regime would greatly increase the transparency of the legislative process, thereby strengthening democracy. It would finally be worth voters taking statements of principle by politicians seriously.

Since this regime could be established only by politicians voluntarily surrendering their legislative powers, it may seem a hopeless proposal. It is not, as the Bank of England's independence and New Zealand's encouraging new Bill show. Democracy can always be improved.

Jamie Whyte is author of Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking

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