Is Michael Martin covering up still more corrupt practices?

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?

This is fun!

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...

Fixing MPs' expenses

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.

To be clear about this, the amount of money that is to be registered is intended to cover all of an MP's expenses: salary, pension, subsistence, accommodation, staff and so on, including the "rotten allowances" like resettlement.  But there would be nothing to stop efficient MPs like Philip Hollobone (who mysteriously*, but admirably, runs his office without any staff) using the surplus he could generate to line his pockets with. That would be the reward for efficiency.

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.)

Is a vote for the Tories a wasted vote?

Eamonn Butler says the Tories look as though they are going to try to make government more efficient.

If Osborn hasn't even worked out that teaching a bureaucrat to be efficient is about as plausible as teaching a pig to sing, then we are in bigger trouble than even I had imagined.

To hell with the consequences

President Obama continues to horrify many Americans with his apparent disdain for business and investors. His plans for putting the tottering Chrysler corporation back on its feet look to be another step on the road to a full-scale depression:

Unlike a traditional reorganization, in which the parties negotiate the terms of a restructuring that is then voted on by each class of creditors and shareholders, the administration plans to quickly sell Chrysler’s most important assets to a new entity—“New Chrysler”—whose stock will be owned by Chrysler’s employees and Fiat. The senior lenders who objected to the government’s offer (which amounted to little more than 30 percent of their claims) will not have any vote on the sale. Their only option is the one they have pursued: objecting to the sale, and praying that bankruptcy judge Arthur Gonzalez takes a hard look at its terms even while the government is breathing down his neck and saying in a sense, he better approve or else.

If investors think their assets are going to be handed over to insiders by the bankruptcy courts then they are simply not going to invest in the American economy. That's a recipe for full-scale depression.

And if there's to be a depression in the US, the effects will surely be felt on this side of the Atlantic too.

More here.

Breaking the BBC's radio monopoly

Iain Dale's internet talk radio debut seems to have been a roaring success, although I didn't listen myself - the household tranny is, well, a tranny and doesn't pick up the internet.

Iain knows his way around a the meedja of course, so we'd expect nothing else from him.

I've been searching for a half-decent talk radio station for years - there's little available here beyond BBC Radios 4 and 5, which are great if you are a superannuated trotskyite revolutionary, but a fat lot of use if your thinking on economics or politics is informed by anything more liberal than Mao Tse Tung or Arthur Scargill.

It would be liberating - literally - to have a regular source of radio comment that didn't fly the red flag as it went.

Maybe Iain Dale can be just that.

On localism

Chris Dillow wonders if people aren't disposed to a truly liberal society, their preferences being distorted by cognitive biases - for example that they might prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't, or that they might see only the benefits of a step in an authoritarian direction but not the hidden costs.

His points are not obviously wrong, but I do wonder if the importance of what he is saying is a function more of the kind of society we have become in the last twenty years than a reflection of the way things have to be.

As the British state has become more and more centralised, it has become virtually impossible for meaningful experiments into different ways of running society to be undertaken. Everything has to be processed by the Whitehall machine with its wide array of British Leyland minds struggling to deal with any idea not rooted in 1940s economic thinking.

Innovation has been well and truly stifled.

In a society where innovation in ways of running things are so difficult, the problems which Chris Dillow identifies are made so much the worse. Rather than having to persuade a majority of people somewhere to overcome their cognitive biases, it is necessary to persuade a majority of people everywhere. In practice it doesn't happen.

It's the same in America, where the constitutional guarantees of federalism and individual sovereignty have been undermined by the Supreme Court leaving the ninth and tenth amendments as mere words that hold no fear for the executive and the legislature alike.

I was therefore interested to see this attempt to add a whole new bill to the constitution, rolling back decades of judicial undermining of American federalism. It remains to be seen if it will amount to anything, but it at least provides a modicum of hope for our transatlantic cousins.

For us in the UK, with our (mainly) unwritten constitution, this sort of grand rewriting of the rules is, of course, not possible. We simply have to choose a government that will devolve power downwards.

I think we could be waiting a long time.

More trouble coming?

Weak demand at a Treasury bond auction touched off worries in the stock market Thursday about the government's ability to raise funds to fight the recession.

The government had to pay greater interest than expected in a sale of 30-year Treasurys. That is worrisome to traders because it could signal that it will become harder for Washington to finance its ambitious economic recovery plans. The higher interest rates also could push up costs for borrowing in areas like mortgages.

This is the US Government rather than ours, but coming so soon after a failure of a UK gilt auction, it does start to look like the markets sending a signal to Messrs Brown and Obama.

Hold on to your hats.

Saving Gordon

Not that anyone in their right mind would want to do anything so foolish, but Sky's resident psephologist reckons that economic recovery is Gordon Brown's only hope of saving his political skin.

From what we know of the prime minister, of course, he will do anything - literally anything - in order to do that.

So if economic recovery is what is required, economic recovery is what will be delivered. So long as growth is positive in a year's time, GB will be content. To that end, expect still more quantitative easing and crazily low interest rates, all designed to engineer a boom in time for the next election.

Oh, wait a minute...

The Bank of England has kept interest rates on hold at 0.5% and announced that it will inject an extra £50bn into the UK economy.

It won't be enough to save him, of course, but he will try and try and try, and if we are all to be taken down with him in the bust that follows the boom, that is not something that Gordon is going to concern himself with.

Left-wing journalism

Tony Curzon Price has written a piece on a proposed new tax:

Taxes are basically a good thing when you put a cost on something that needs some degree of discouragement. This is why a carbon tax would be good. Left-wing journalism falls into that category. Every time a left wing journalist misrepresents the facts, it should be counted as a pure social cost. Moreover, in a world of multiple news sources, I do not believe that someone who is actively searching for the truth actually needs left wing journalism.  Google does a perfectly acceptable job if you're looking for the truth.  And if you end up believing something that isn't true, I think that the likelihood of a mis-sell - of having swallowed a pack of fibs - is very high.

That suggests that left-wing journalism, which has a high private pay-off to the writer, also has a high externality, or social cost.

So, go ahead and tax left wing journalism.

(I've changed it a bit)

Fixing the country - a dilemma

The Heresiarch wonders where the money has all gone. The answer, he notes, is that a great deal of it has been blown on shiny new schoolsnhospitals and bloated salaries and pensions for the Labour voters who work in them.

The capital costs are gone, of course and it's fair to say that this particular aspect of the spending spree will have to be brought to an abrupt halt. Whether the current incumbent of Number Ten has the will to switch the taps off is another matter; perhaps he's going for the scorched earth strategy and reform will have to wait for a change of government.

The fat salaries, and the pensions that can only be described as "obese", are different though. Here, the government can take steps to reduce costs. So, faced with an urgent need to cut back on the costs, what will Messrs Cameron and Osborne do?

If they have programmes of redundancies in the public sector, they will end up with smaller numbers of employees and lower costs, but those left behind will still be grossly overpaid and the services they deliver will inevitably be adversely affected.

Can an incoming government persuade public sector workers to take reductions in pay and benefits, just like the private sector? You can't see the unions taking that one lying down, can you? This road looks as though it will end in tears.

What then? The answer is, of course, full-scale privatisation and the introduction of competition. This is really the only reliable way we have of dealing with overpaid workers. However, when you look at Cameron and Osborne you don't see two men with the character to take these sorts of decisions. They come over as slightly naive fops rather than economic reformers. Will Dave and Gideon really sell off those schoolsnhospitals? Didn't think so.

It's hard to see a way out of this.

Environmentalists trashing the environment (Part 94)

I haven't posted anything on this meme for a while, but Picking Losers has a jaw-dropping article on carbon capture. Our green friends are now proposing to ship liquefied carbon dioxide around the world in search of somewhere to store it.

The left and liberalism

People often criticise the writers on Liberal Conspiracy for their lack of liberalism. "Socialist Conspiracy" would be a better title, they say.

It's hard not to agree since they are so keen on state control - "the absolute authority of the state" as one of their writers put it - and their apparent abhorrence of anyone being able to do anything without their behaviour being "regulated".

I've always struggled to understand the connection between the left and liberalism, so I found this article interesting. Its conclusion that the left is grounded in liberalism, but is trying to move away from it explains a great deal about our current predicament.

In this sense, modern conservatism has always been liberal, and there is nothing particularly contradictory about the fact that ... conservatives are the defenders of classical liberalism... There is also nothing terribly surprising about the way in which the modern left, in the effort to progress beyond liberalism, has often undermined and attacked liberalism.

Is the Nursing & Midwifery Council a tool of government?

So, Margaret Haywood, the nurse who secretly filmed abuse of elderly patients at the Royal Brighton Hospital has been struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. 

The decision makes no sense to most people. What Margaret Haywood did was so manifestly in the public interest, so the decision to strike her off looks bizarre. Of course, we should never, ever make the mistake that professional bodies like the NMC are there to protect the interests of the public, despite what they might say on their websites. They exist solely to protect their members - that goes without saying. And if their members are abusing patients then they will protect them just the same. In these circumstances Margaret Haywood was probably expendable.

There's another interesting facet to the NMC though. Although it is a charity, the NMC doesn't appear to be a candidate for fakecharities.org - its income seems to be derived almost entirely legitimately, from membership fees and so on. But tucked away in the notes to its accounts is this interesting fact:

The Nursing and Midwifery Council is accountable to the Privy Council. The Nursing and Midwifery Order 2001 sets out the nature of the relationship between the NMC and the Privy Council and the reporting mechanisms required. Whilst not accountable to the Department of Health, the NMC has regular contact with the Department on policy and other matters.

Could this explain the bizarre decision in the Haywood case?

The Damien Green affair

Head of Legal thinks the Civil Service are working for them rather than us:

Something very wrong is happening here. The Home Secretary had steam coming out of her ears and agreed with referral to police: had she not agreed, clearly no reference would have been made. Yet Keith Vaz chooses to interpret what happened as entirely the work of civil servants? I don't think the evidence his committee heard justifies what he said this morning, and I suspect him of minimising ministers' role for political reasons. In the worst traditions of loyalty to politicians rather than the public, the civil service will take the rap for this matter as though it had acted on its own; and Labour MPs are happy to whitewash their party seniors, failing in their duty to hold government to account. We need an inquiry into Keith Vaz as much as anything else.