The Speaker's committee

The news that the Lib Dems are going to boycott the Speaker's committee because they see it as a stitch-up is welcome. Iain Dale is calling for the Tories to follow suit.

But if there is not to be a Labour majority on the committee, how then should it be staffed? It seems to me that Labour and Conservatives both have too much of a vested interest in the findings - they both desperately need to win vindication for their actions in the past. It seems to me then that it is only the LibDems, of the major three parties, who can justify their presence on the committee.

Two LibDems, one each from the Scots and Welsh Nats, and one of the independents, plus a token Red and a token Blue; that's the answer.

Monbiot on corporate welfare

George Monbiot has a rather-less-moonbatty-than-usual article in the Guardian this morning. Entitled "The free market preachers have long practised state welfare for the rich", it's actually more an attack on corporate welfare per se than on the people who support it. In fact the headline writer seems not to have read the article at all, because Monbiot spends quite a lot of time quoting approvingly from a report by the Cato Institute, who are nothing if not arch free marketeers.

It's not often I find myself agreeing with Monbiot, but he has a point. There is absolutely no excuse for subsidising business, whether through direct payments, or through carefully constructed tax loopholes. He's not presenting any solutions in his article though - he's just railing at the problem, and I wonder if this is because the solutions are unpalatable to him.

I've put forward the idea before that we could have a law that made payments to corporate bodies illegal, except in fair payment for goods or services received. That would draw in all the subsidies to lobbyists, companies, NGOs, trades unions and all the horrible regiment of wheedling crooks that beset the political system. Of course, it will never happen because the big political parties are all in hock to these crooks, but in essence it's a simple solution to a complex problem.

Corporate tax dodges are also easily avoided, by simple means of abolishing corporate tax (or at the very least making them flat), but I can't see Monbiot going for that either. He doesn't care how low your salary is - if you are putting something away in your pension then you have to pay tax on it at corporate level.

You can't help feeling that George is actually quite happy with the idea of corporate welfare - it gives him something to rail at and stops him having to deal with the consequences of solving the problem.

Constituency correspondence

DK has been harassing an MP about her ignorance of some legislation she was voting on. To her credit, Labour's Kerry McCarthy has at least responded to DK's criticisms, although I think she's on pretty shaky ground, having admitted that she didn't understand the VAT on jaffa cakes issue despite having researchers paid to find out this kind of thing for her.

One thing she said caught my attention though:

Yes, I'll get my massively overpaid and underworked team of researchers and caseworkers to spend the rest of the week checking obscure bits of tax legislation, with instructions not to stop until they find out exactly which categories Hula Hoops, Wotsits and Quavers fall into. And let's not forget Twiglets.

For all those who constantly raise the expenditure on staff and office costs - would you rather I didn't employ anyone, didn't follow up on casework, didn't have anyone answer the phones or open the door to the hundreds of people who contact me asking me for help or advice each year?

This instantly made me think of Philip Hollobone, the Conservative MP who manages to deal with his workload without any staff at all.  How does he do it?, I wondered.

So I thought I'd write and ask him.  A couple of minutes ago, I fired off a short email. Outlook recorded the time as 8:56 am. I've now had a response and Outlook has recorded a time of delivery as 8:55 am! This seems, erm, very efficient!

That was a preliminary "Are you a consituent?" kind of thing, and I've now replied, and had a further response (timed at 9:06am) from Mr Hollobone. He doesn't want to go into the details unfortunately, but it's remarkable that he was able to deal with my, admittedly rather trivial, correspondence in a total of ten minutes.

What he did say was this:

I would certainly say that MPs which employ a large number of staff should be able to offer a near faultless service, with quick and comprehensive responses to enquiries. 

And given that his own staff-free service seems remarkably good anyway, it's a hard statement to argue with.