It’s not the hours you put in – It’s what you put into the hours

 BY NIKOLAI HOLMOV

Of the best bosses your author has every worked for, both have been women – and fearsome, professionally demanding, but quite brilliant women they were too – as is perhaps to be expected for those that reached lofty institutional heights within late 1970’s Britain.

One in particular was fond of stating “It’s not the hours you put in – It’s what you put into the hours” – and then continued to work all the hours God sent with incredible and unfailing insight, intuition and accuracy, setting an incredibly high standard for the mere cogs that made up the machinery of the department (such as you author).

That expression however, has remained within the consciousness of your author – albeit today with regard to the blog, it is more a case of “It’s not the minutes that are put in – It’s what is put into the minutes” when producing the daily dirge relating to Ukraine.

All of which brings about this latest statistical barrage relating to the first year’s activities of the Verkhovna Rada.

This convocation worked 89 days, as opposed to its predecessor’s 78.  Over 4780 draft laws or resolutions were submitted – 34% more than the previous convocation.  Of the draft laws and resolutions submitted, 1344 (28%) were actually considered, of which 765 were ultimately successful.

85% of the President’s submissions for consideration to the Verkhovna Rada were successful.  Only 33% of that submitted by the government got an affirmative nod, and a mere 14% made the grade from the MPs of the Verkhovna Rada.

Though the statistics go further and paint an interesting picture, for the purposes of this entry there is no need to go on.

The numbers are mind-boggling.  4780 draft laws and/or resolutions submitted – meaning MPs spent the time (or their boiler room staff and/or “sponsors” spent their time) crafting legal text just over 70% of which was clearly nonsense and not even worthy of serious committee consideration – and duly wasn’t.

Of the 1344 (or 28%) that was given committee time, 579 submissions were also dismissed by the relevant Verkhovna Rada Committees, or failed to garner sufficient votes amongst the parliamentarians to be successful.

What of the exceptionally large number of successful new laws (61%) or adopted resolutions (39%) – all 765 of them over the past 12 months?

Can the printers of legal tomes that adorn the libraries of advocates and notaries even attempt to keep up?  Can the legal system and those that work within it keep up?  What of the institutions of State or the regulators?  By way of example, and without listing all policy areas, there were 65 new successful Tax and Customs Bills, 63 relating to law enforcement, and 51 national security and defence – with another 586 across all other areas of governance, it seems pointless to list them all when the point has been made.

Have any of these newly adopted legal norms been effectively implemented?  If so, is anybody monitoring the effects?  In short, is the newly adopted legal prose working as intended – or is it ineffective, or worse proving to be counterproductive?

If most of the 765 adopted legalese has gone unimplemented, would repealing 765 existing laws have been more beneficial to the Ukrainian constituency instead?  Lord knows the Ukrainian statute book is replete with Soviet legacy legislative (and by extension bureaucratic) hangovers.

(On the subject of Soviet legacy nonsense, why is it still required to show an internal passport to buy a rail ticket from Odessa to Kyiv or Lviv, when it’s possible to drive there or get the bus to these cities without showing any ID?  That such flapdoodle and codswallop persists, and for what purpose other than to continue a Soviet hangover, who knows?)

Now there will be literally thousands and thousands (and thousands) of legislative changes required to facilitate the Association Agreement and DCFTA with the EU over the next decade – there is no denying this – but it is structured (for if the EU knows how to do anything, it knows how to do bureaucracy).  There are time scales for different areas of legislative integration.

Therefore, within such a framework with specific time lines there are obviously priorities, and it may be that the feckless Ukrainian parliamentarians (that are so incapable of crafting decent legislation that only 14% submitted gets past the Verkhovna Rada committees and their peers in the chamber), will stumble and fumble in the face of legislation that is upon the immediate horizon (despite having 28 existing EU acceptable choices for almost all proposed laws to choose from already in existence amongst the Member States).

It will also be the case that there are domestic legislative acts that are not tied to the Association Agreement that are also deemed priorities (and again the 28 “European examples” will be ignored) that will garner the same entirely feckless response by way of speedily crafted and inept legal prose submissions – but other legislative requirements provide a little more time for consideration and can thus propose to amend entire legal chapters and/or frameworks in a single draft submission, freeing up countless wasted parliamentary hours both of the parliamentarians drafting poor text, and of the Verkhovna Rada Committees refusing – before even getting to a vote.

Less, as they say, is more (on many occasions anyway) – and clearly far less grotesquely substandard drafting, and far more consideration and thoughtfulness would provide for not putting in the extra hours, but increase the quality of what goes into the hours put in.

It’s not as though the additional 11 days this Verkhovna Rada convocation has sat, nor the vast majority of the successfully passed 765 Bills and Resolutions, have come anywhere near meeting even the lowest of expectations of society – and most of those laws and resolutions that come close to having a potentially positive effect have been pushed through by “friends of Ukraine” with carrot or stick, or by the IMF.

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