Your tax money at work

It's probably too much to hope that heads might roll over this.

(Via Samizdata). 

Michael Martin in trouble again

Michael Martin has been caught at it again. Following hot on the heels of the revelations about his dodgy expenses come allegations that he's colluding with the government to suppress a FoI request into the costs of the ID cards scheme.

SpyBlog has the truly scandalous details. 

Different priorities

Two news stories from recent days could be seen as highlighting a different sense of priorities among the two main parties:

Conservative MPs propose recall motions against errant MPs

Labour (and one Lib(?)Dem) MPs sign early day motion praising Fidel Castro

I suppose we should be grateful that some of our elected representatives are still trying. 

Cabinet Office accounts

Dizzy wonders why the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is avoiding answering the question of how much public money it paid to Capita plc (a major Labour party donor). The man in charge, Tom Watson says it's too expensive for his department to find out.

A cursory Googling reveals that the Cabinet Office's accounting system is Sun Accounts, and there seems to be an external procurement package running alongside it - from the linked document it's order processing only, which could mean that the invoice processing is done through Sun. 

It's possible that there are ancillary systems in, for example, Cabinet Office quangos which is probably how the justify the "too expensive" argument.

My suggestion would be to rephrase the question as: "how much was paid to Capita plc in each of year since 2001 via (a) the Cabinet Office's Sun Accounts system and, if different (b) the e-Pop system." This should pick up the bulk of the payments, but should be a trivial query for a semi-competent IT bod to do. Say 30 mins maximum each.

Anyone fancy giving an FoI a try? 

Back to the seventies

Inflation, strikes, flared trousers and now they're nationalising the banks.

How many Labour MPs are on the fiddle?

The latest development in the "Cash for Conways" scandal is the pathetic sight of the party leaders trying to outdo each other in making minor concessions to the idea of transparency.

We've had Cameron telling us that 70 of his MPs employ family members and that he's going to tell which frontbenchers do April.

Why April? Why not now? He knows who they are. Why can't he tell us? And why only the frontbenchers?

Someone of a more cynical frame of mind than me might conclude that rather more than 70 had family members "on the payroll" but that only these 70 were actually making them do any work in return. The others have a couple of months to exorcise these ghost workers so that the boy Dave can present a clean bill of health for the new financial year.

Apart from the departure of Conway, one good thing to come out of this has been the reaction of the Tory grassroots. The deluge of invective from ordinary Conservatives suggest that the party rank and file are of a rather better character than their representatives in Westminster. It's also instructive to compare this reaction to that of the Labour grassroots over the Hain revelations. The red corner was virtually silent on the issue. Only one Labour Home article actually covered the issue directly and started thusly:

Poor Peter Hain, he is being hounded for failing to declare donations to his DL election campaign. Its something that can be easily overlooked in the heat of an election campaign. Its wasn't his fault unless he was made directly aware of it himself.

A couple of commenters said he should go, but the rest were more concerned about the embarrassment to the party. It rather smacks of a bunch of people whose attitude to wrongdoing is "my party, right or wrong". Which may be how we got into this mess in the first place.

Then again, one can wonder just what Labour MPs are hiding themselves. These figures show how MPs voted on the third reading of the bill to exclude MPs expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.

 

So it looks very much to me like a very large number of Labour MPs were very keen to support a Conservative private member's bill. Far more than would have been needed to win the vote.

I wonder why? 

Either way, I think we should keep a very close eye on the expenses issue, because I think the folks in Westminster are hoping we're going to forget about it. 

Sounding the retreat

Labour Home has put out a signal to all on the left to steer clear of story about Nigel Waterson having been arrested for allegedly assaulting his children. Says Alex Hilton:

Comrades, I have just heard the details of why Tory MP Nigel Waterson was involved with the police recently. I'm afraid it's not my place to divulge these details but I'd be grateful if you took my word for it that this is not a matter we should be writing about. I will be deleting all posts about this issue. Please do email me if this causes you any concern.

It looks a bit late to me though. This particular horse seems already to have bolted:

THE CROOK, THE WIFEBEATER and THE VIOLENT BULLY…….TODAY’S TORIES.. says Ian bone

Nigel Waterson thrashes kids said Recess Monkey (Now deleted) 

Tory MP arrested in child abuse scandal said Bob Piper 

Tory Shadow minister arrested for assaulting children said Labour Home 

It's been said before that you post in haste and repent at leisure. It's particularly funny to see Recess Monkey getting this basic tenet of blogging wrong again. Remember the Thatcher obituary? Some people never learn. 

Rolling back the last ten years

With all the polls predicting a Conservative government at the next election, it's reasonable to question what changes a Cameron government might make when they finally take control. To what extent might they be ready to roll back the last ten years of the expansion of the state, the erosion of civil liberties and corruption of civil society?

Do you think that Cameron will return habeus corpus to three days? Do you think he will privatise the schools or the hospitals, or restore the right to protest in the vicinity of parliament?

Me neither.

Assuming then that he continues with the policies of the Labour party; that the schools continue to decline, that the hospitals are hotbeds of infectious disease (if you can even manage to get an appointment). Suppose that detention without charge gets extended to forty or fifty days and that a whole plethora of new reasons to demand entry to your home are written into law.

What then?

Will people abandon political parties completely, and abandon the polling booth completely. Or will they switch to peripheral and/or extremist parties?

It seems to me that it doesn't actually matter, so long as they do one or the other. Any long-term solution to the political impasse into which the Lab/Con duopoly have driven us has to involve the death of both heads of the political monster which threatens us. Now some people might find this rather alarming - as any vote for an unfamiliar party can unnerve some - but when you think about it, it's not as alarming as being locked up for three months without charge because someone in government doesn't like the colour of your shirt, which seems to be the way things are heading at the moment.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I am lost to mainstream politics. They are all crooks, and they are all corrupt, and until they are all strung up from Westminster lampposts, or at least consigned to the political dustbin, we are all in danger.

Chutzpah

You have to admire the brass neck of a man who can bemoan the loonies that inhabit the (D)HYS forums on the BBC website in the same article in which he claims that the corporation has a right-wing bias.

Gordon Brown's education

Gordon Brown has been holding forth on the subject of education.

We've moved our schools from being below average to being above average. We've now got to make them world class.

Whatever Gordon Brown studied at Edinburgh, I'm quite certain it wasn't mathematics because his understanding of the word "average" seems a little, shall we say, hazy. We know this because the BBC reports in the same article that the government has been stung into action by 

a controversial report earlier this year from Unicef, which put the UK at the bottom of a league table of children's well-being among 21 industrialised nations.

Private prosecutions

Now that the CPS have decided that there is insufficient evidence to proceed with any prosecutions in the cash for honours affair, Guido is rounding up volunteers to back a private prosecution. While this is a great idea, there is a risk that the CPS  take over the prosecution and then promptly drop it. The details of their powers in this respect are here; essentially they can drop the case if:

• There is so little evidence that there is no case to answer; or
• The prosecution falls far below the public interest test in the Code for Crown Prosecutors; or
• The prosecution is likely to damage the interests of justice.

It looks to my untrained eye as if the CPS would struggle to make a decent case for dropping it. They have refused to prosecute themselves because they don't think they can get a guilty verdict (let's leave aside the absurdly high standard they have set themselves). This is not the same as having so little evidence that there is no case to answer.

I can't conceive of any argument they could make that the prosecution was against the interests of the public or of justice, so there doesn't appear to be an "out" for the crooks here either.

The other thing to think about is the political fallout of the CPS taking over and then dropping a case against close confidants of the prime minister. It would look nothing if not very, very corrupt. Would Brown really risk it rebounding on him now that Blair is long gone?

So all in all, it looks like it's worth a punt.  We live in hope.

Predictions for Blair's resignation honours list

Alistair Campbell surely. Michael White of the Graun is a shoo-in too.

More suggestions in the comments please. 

A bunch of monkeys

Having found myself in the odd position of praising Labour Home for its response to David McLean's Freedom of Information Act, I was almost relieved to read a real howler of an article up there today.

The author of the piece, who goes under the nom-de-blog of Howlermonkey (you couldn't make this up, could you?), writes about the antics of an evangelical christian called Richard Turnbull, who has apparently been telling us that we're all going to hell. This doesn't actually strike me as very interesting in itself - I thought this was what evangelical christians did - but there you are. However, Mr Howlermonkey goes on to make a gobsmackingly pathetic attempt to link Mr Turnbull to the Conservative Party. The article is called "The Tory Taliban in Oxford" and includes this little nugget:

[Turnbull] Also suggested that Torie party donate 10% of it’s income to conservative evangelical Collages such as Wycliffe.

If you refer back to some of the original sources for Mr Monkey's article - the Guardian and the Indy as far as I can tell - the facts were reported thus:

In [his speech], Dr Turnbull also warns against the danger of liberalism in the church, talks of ‘the strategic nature’ of evangelical control of training colleges and calls on conservatives to siphon off 10% of their financial contributions to the Church of England to help pay the costs of like-minded colleges.

So in fact Mr Monkey is, either dishonestly or foolishly, conflating "conservatives" with "The Conservative Party". To judge from his writing, I am relieved to say that it appears to be the latter.

Labour Home is much improved since its relaunch, to the extent that I'm now a regular reader. But I do wonder if they are just going to get themselves into trouble with their relatively open editorial policy. If they allow writers of this quality to infest their site, they will end up looking like, well, a bunch of monkeys. 

Encouraging

Labour Home has a thread up about David McLean's outrageous bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. Encouragingly the punters there are pointing the finger at their own MPs and condemning them in no uncertain terms. I had expected lots of cringeworthy party loyalty from LH, so if the message is getting through that politicians are the problem, not the solution, then we may have a major step forward on our hands.

In related news, Alistair Darling is trying to emasculate the FoI Act even further. 

Bloggers4Labour

Bloggers4Labour is asking if we shouldn't give education vouchers a try. I can't help but think of the old Churchill quote:

You can rely on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted every other option.

Perhaps it's going too far to suggest that one can rely on Labour to do the right thing eventually, but I'm pleased that B4L is brave enough to ask the question. Not sure he's in the right party to get any action on this though.