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Bishop Hill May 19, 2009 Politicians Sleaze If we cannot trust ourselves, and cannot be trusted by the British people to sort out our own pay and allowances, how on earth can we be trusted with the nuclear deterrent, the state of the economy and the other much more important things with which we are meant to be trusted?
(How indeed?)
Bishop Hill May 19, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Is my logic flawed somewhere?
Bishop Hill May 19, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Has the opposition been so supine over the last ten years because they had their fingers in the till?
In other words could an MP have been told not to protest the actions of the government too loudly, in case word of their expense claims should find their way to a newspaper?
Bishop Hill May 18, 2009 Labour Politicians Sleaze LabourHome is reporting that the constituency Labour party in Luton south is standing behind their troughing MP, Marge Moran - her of the rotten house in Southampton.
This is wonderful news. The party is demonstrating to everyone that not only are its MPs corrupt but their supporters are too. Believe me, they are going to be toast.
More of this please.
Bishop Hill May 18, 2009 Politicians Sleaze No, really! DK is saying he's got to quit, but let's face it: if he stays on (with the connivance of Gordon Brown) we could well be looking at a complete wipe-out for Labour at the next election. I mean complete. One so big that the Lib Dems end up becoming the next official opposition.
And that's what I call a win.
Bishop Hill May 14, 2009 Nanny state Politicians Regulation Security I chanced upon this site, which puts up a daily photo of the police at work. This is a protest against the government's silly law criminalising the photographing of law enforcement officers.
This prompted a thought. A policeman friend told me that there is a police open day at Fife Police HQ this weekend. Some awkward sod should report everyone who takes a snap of a copper to, erm, one of the coppers present.
This should cause complete and utter chaos, ruin the police's PR day and publicise what a terrible law Mr Brown and his legions of lunatics have put in place.
Just a thought.
Bishop Hill May 13, 2009 Politicians Sleaze It's not often that one gets a blog link from someone currently being hailed as a national heroine. In my case, it's Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner who has, more than anyone, been responsible for getting the details of MPs' expenses out into the open.
Heather picked up on my posting about Michael Martin's use of the s34 exemption to the Freedom of Information Act to quash a request about MPs' paid-for trips abroad. It turns out that this exemption was put in place to deal with pressing matters of national security! This is starting to look like a pattern in government legislation isn't it? "Counter-terrorism laws will only be used against terrorists" and so on.
Mr Speaker has also, it seems, used the exemption to deal with matters even less pressingly important than overseas junkets - for example the setting up of the Parliamentary Beer Group.
MPs' tolerance of Martin in the position of speaker is starting to look almost as culpable as their expense claims.
In the meantime, Heather has been setting up an online petition. Together with the Taxpayers' Alliance, she is demanding full disclosure of MPs' expenses. This seems like a pretty good one to sign up for.
Bishop Hill May 13, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Reading between the lines of the reports of Cameron's press conference on Tory MPs' expenses yesterday, he has gone as far as he can with the parliamentary Conservative party. As Adam Boulton explains, paying back the ill-gotten gains is as far as Tory MPs are willing to go.
When someone is punished, either they are contrite and take their punishment or they are not. Clearly the Tory MPs are not. They still feel that they are in a position to negotiate over what their punishment will be. They presumably still feel they have done nothing wrong - the argument that "it was within the rules" argument seems to dominate their thoughts.
Lots of people have pointed out that this kind of thinking suggests an inability to distinguish right from wrong. This is undoubtedly true.
And we can't have people like that as our representatives in Parliament.
It's very sad for Cameron, who I think would go further if he had the ability to do so, but he relies on the parliamentary party for his position. He cannot force the crooks out. So there's no alternative but for the electorate to deal with the issue themselves. The fact remains that decent people cannot vote for the three big parties and I hope they give their verdict accordingly.
Bishop Hill May 12, 2009 Politicians Sleaze What jolly japes this expenses saga is launching.
Lord Tebbit has announced this morning that people should not vote Tory - or words to that effect; it was slightly more nuanced than that. This has got readers at Conservative Home in a bit of a tizzy, with Jonathan Isaby arguing that the whip should be withdrawn from the noble lord.
The thing is though, surely Lord Rottweiler is right - surely nobody with a shred of decency would want to vote for a party awash in corruption and graft? Jonathan Isaby is obviously keen to maintain internal discipline in the party he supports, but this is the problem with party politics. At times, you are put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between what is best for your party and what is best for your country.
I would have thought that the only possible answer to the dilemma is to choose country over party, if one is to maintain even a shred of self-respect. Decent people will refuse to vote Tory, just as Lord Tebbit suggests.
I wonder how many Conservatives support the Isaby line?
Bishop Hill May 11, 2009 Politicians Sleaze What an odd coincidence.
While passing my eye over recent decisions of the Information Commissioner (as one does), this ruling caught my attention. A member of the public had asked for correspondence and documentation relating to whether members of parliament should declare overseas trips paid for by the British Council.
The Parliamentary authorities ruled that the information was exempt under the Freedom of Information Act, because its release would "infringe the privileges of the house".
The request went to internal review, was rejected again, and was then passed to the Information Commissioner for a final decision.
At this point, who should intervene but Speaker Martin, Gorbals Mick himself, who promptly issued a certificate under s43(3). This part of the Freedom of Information Act essentially says that the Speaker is going to be the arbiter of whether Parliamentary privilege is in danger or not.
He decided that it was. Quelle surprise.
So, reading between the lines, would you say that the British Council has been paying for MPs holidays and that Speaker Martin has intervened to keep everything hushed up?
Rotten timing for Mr Speaker, isn't it?
Bishop Hill May 11, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Michael Martin loses it over expenses....
Douglas Carswell tables a motion calling for Martin to quit, the first such call for a speak to go since 1694....
Conservative Home says tomorrow will be very ugly for the Tories...
And there's hints of more to come...
Bishop Hill May 11, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Here's a plan for how MPs' expenses should be dealt with in future. It goes without saying that immediate steps, such as displaying the heads of the current batch of malefactors at Traitors Gate, will have to precede any of this.
MPs represent their constitutents. They do not represent the state, or parliament or themselves. Their remuneration should therefore be strictly a matter between them and their respective constituents. 
My plan is therefore that during each general election campaign, candidates should announce how much they will cost their constituents if elected to serve at Westminster. This prospective cost will be registered with, say, the Electoral Commission. After the election, the winning candidate will go on to be paid the amount of money they originally proposed, each year for the duration of their time in Parliament.
In an ideal world, the cost would not only be agreed with the constituents but also be borne by them (or perhaps even by the electors who voted for him - that might concentrate minds!) but a practical way of putting this into practice eludes me for the moment. However, even the simple link between the cost of an MP and the electorate who choose him would have a salutory effect on Westminster.
For example, it would undoubtedly bring down the cost of an MP. If I recall correctly, the typical MP costs the taxpayer about £250,000 a year. I don't believe for a minute that this is a reasonable figure - much or it is surely "padding" - family members' sinecures a la Conway and so on - but there is absolutely nothing to stop candidates pitching for this kind of money if that's what they feel it takes. The big parties will have to look carefully at this issue in order to decide how much they need to pay to attract the kind of people they want. If the answer is £250 big ones then so be it. Smaller parties may feel they can win votes by pitching their candidates at a lower level. That's fine too. Who knows, maybe Dave Cameron will find that expensive old Etonians are suddenly not quite so important to Project Tory as he had previously thought.
There's no doubt that as soon the more a candidate's bid is seen as excessive, the more it will become a stick with which rival candidates can beat him. This can only be a good thing.
It would also deal with the different costs of representing different constituencies. The MP for the Western Isles (or whatever it's called these days) will probably have a different cost-base to the MP for Chelsea and Fulham (or wherever). Whether the cost of maintaining a constituency home in Benbecula rather than Chelsea offsets the cost of flying to the Isles each week as opposed to catching the number 24 bus from Westminster to your front door is a moot point. Let candidates and their constituents decide it among themselves.
Fixing MPs' expenses doesn't just mean "mending the system". I also mean "fixing" the cost of MPs: the remuneration figure would be static until the next election. No index-linking, "no adjustments". If politicians vote for inflationary policies, they have to live with the consequences. If they want to go on fact-finding missions to New Zealand, then that is their prerogative, but not a penny more should find its way to their coffers.
Of course, some will be concerned that rich Tory candidates will be able to undercut working class Labour candidates. There are a number of responses to this. Firstly, most candidates for elected office are now career politicians and they are therefore all in the same boat - they have essentially the same pecuniary needs. Secondly, it's not immediately obvious that Labour candidates are any less wealthy than Tories. Shaun Woodward is hardly worried about where his next meal is coming from. Thirdly, today's release of the Tory expenses scandals suggest that extreme wealth does little to attenutate politicians desire to extract money from the public purse: the risk of wealthy candidates offering to work for nothing seems limited. regrettable as that is. If this issue proved to be a sticking point, it would of course be quite easy to institute a statutory minimum: say twice median earnings, and perhaps with a minimal allowance for travel.
The way I see it going, providing MPs were not greedy about it, the cost of their remuneration would simply not be an issue at election time. If one candidate went in at £80k and another at £100k, nobody is going to treat it as an issue at the doorstep. People have bigger fish to fry than a difference of this size. But as soon as someone starts to look like they're on the make, they are electoral toast.
Which is as it should be.
(*The mystery is why he can manage this, but not one of the other MPs can. Anyone would think MPs were installing family members on sinecures rather than paying for staff.)
Bishop Hill Mar 23, 2009 Conservatives Politicians An important speech by Douglas Carswell, the Tory MP for Somewhereorother, is covered by DK (without swearing once!).
Once upon a time there was genuine scrutiny. Indeed, as some people may know, a war was once fought over the extent to which the House was able to vote to approve supply and Government moneys. However, this House has slowly but definitely lost its power to oversee how the Executive spend our money. The quango state, on which the PAC produces so many of its reports, is in effect beyond budgetary scrutiny. Retrospective audit on the PAC is pretty much all that is left.
Read the whole thing.
Bishop Hill Feb 27, 2009 Nanny state Politicians Frank Field, writing in the Mail, reminisces about his meetings with Margaret Thatcher while she was PM. It contained this interesting point, which rather seems to support my pet theory that it is the civil service which is the real enemy:
There wasn’t much in her record as Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s Government to suggest she would be a great Prime Minister.
But when she entered No10 she understood she had to get control of the Whitehall machine – and not be bypassed by it, as had occurred with so many of her predecessors.
There's no doubt that both Blair and Brown have been unable to introduce any meaningful reform of Leviathan. They have been ignored by the mandarins and have proved powerless to do anthing about it. The country is therefore left with the slender hope that David Cameron can do any better.
Oh dear.
Perhaps our best hope for salvation lies in a sudden collapse of government finances, sweeping aside the whole state edifice overnight. Painful, perhaps, but quick and decisive.
Bishop Hill Feb 2, 2009 EU Liberalism Politicians The must-read article today is Janet Daley in the Telegraph, wondering if the EU chickens aren't coming home to roost.
What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.
It's an interesting moral dilemma for liberals when an undemocratic body like the EU has put in place laws that are liberal in nature. Democracy is likely to give us protectionism and economic depression. Of course under a liberal constitution, movement of labour would not be subject to democratic control anyway, but a liberal constitution being about as likely as Gordon Brown winning the next election, the most likely outcome is that democracy will win out.
It's a worrying prospect.
