I think this would be better as part of a combined article on Bill of Rights Bill. Both this page's title and that page's title could refer to both articles' contents.

Also it would allow comparison between the two bills. DotCoder (talk) 10:41, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree a merge would be best in this instance. In any case, Bill of Rights Bill should be renamed to reflect that it has only been proposed, but not ratified, similarly to this 2015 bill. OXYLYPSE (talk) 08:09, 12 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Given the argument against the title Bill of Rights Bill (as it was only proposed ...), a merge to Proposed British Bill of Rights would then be the better target. The lede could explain the code, including the formal names of each. Klbrain (talk) 20:52, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose merge (albeit weakly). I'll declare a teeny bias upfront as the original creator of the article on the Bill of Rights Bill, but I'm not sure merging is a good idea. The 2022 version was fleshed out into an actual Bill that was introduced to Parliament (albeit only at first reading), while the 2015 version was not. The article on the 2022 version contains a clause-by-clause breakdown as well as a lot of pretty well sourced discussion of the context and politics of the 2022 bill.

There has been significant discussion by academics, lawyers and the wider polity of both. The 2022 one got more criticism, probably because it had been solidified into an actual bill, while the 2015 version was shelved before anyone had tried to draft a bill. The article on the 2015 one doesn't cover much, but there's more sourcing out there that could be used to build the article out. My concern is that if we were to merge the two articles together, you'd essentially have one very long article that would be heavily overweighted to cover the 2022 version.

Naming – I take the point that "Bill of Rights Bill" is a somewhat odd name. Normally, legislation starts as a bill—e.g. the Online Safety Bill—then once it passes, it becomes an Act. And on Wikipedia, we create an article about the Bill, then move it once it becomes an act. Online Safety Bill now, for instance, is a disambiguation page that links to three Acts (in the UK, US and Sri Lanka). The BRB unhelpfully does not follow this convention and takes us back to ye olde world of Parliamentary conventions that gave us the Statute of Frauds and so on. In part, one might speculate, because the government sought to make the 2022 Bill seem incredibly important in a way that "Human Rights (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill" wouldn't. Had it passed through Parliament and been granted Royal Assent, it would have been called the "Bill of Rights 2022" (per the short name section). As such, "Bill of Rights Bill" arguably does convey that it hasn't been ratified.

If the articles were to merge, one concern is that we'd be saying that the 2022 version is a "British Bill of Rights". It's clear to me that the 2022 effort was a continutation of the 2015 proposal, but I'm not really seeing any of the sources refer to the 2022 bill using the term "British". The government's consultation response doesn't use the phrase "British Bill of Rights". In the Commons debate on the 22 June 2022, Dominic Raab does not use the expression "British Bill of Rights" to refer to the 2022 bill. Two backbenchers use it: Jack Brereton and Peter Bone (the latter referring to a Private Members' Bill he sought to introduce). Professor Elliott's blog post notes that Raab attempted to step away from the previous framing of a Bill of Rights being particularly British, as well as rebutting "the idea that the convention was a British creation is almost neo-imperial myth making". I clicked few a few other sources in the references section of the article on the 2022 BRB and didn't see many that used the framing of it as a "British" bill either. To suggest it is might be leaning a little bit too far into original research.

If a merge were on the cards, I'd counsel against any title that frames the 2022 BRB as "British" in wikivoice as unsourced OR. (There was one such use in the current article whic I've just fixed.) The alternative title could be something like "Proposed United Kingdom bills of rights", perhaps. I'll freely admit this is very clunky. (Part of why I'm keen on the current status quo is I can't see a good alternative name for a merged article though I'm all ears if someone can come up with one.) —Tom Morris (talk) 11:05, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]