It’s difficult to explain the sudden flowering of interest in constitutional reform. It apparently arises out of the general panic in the Westminster village about public anger and contempt over the abuse of (some) MPs’ expense allowances. This has reinforced already existing disillusionment with our parliament, our parliamentary system, even politics itself. There’s no obvious logical link between an MP dipping his hand in the public purse for money to clear out the moat surrounding his house, on the one hand, and the upsurge of demand in some quarters for proportional representation in elections to the house of commons (euphemistically referred to by its fans as “electoral reform”) on the other. But there it is: one thing seems to have led to another. Some say it’s displacement therapy: playing around with ideas for reforming the constitution to take our minds off the squalid saga of the crooked MPs and the incomprehensible recession. Others say it’s a deliberate attempt to distract attention from MPs’ misdeeds and the recession, which comes to the same thing. Or perhaps the idea of reform is contagious: the system of MPs’ allowances obviously needs to be radically changed, so while we’re at it, we might as well abolish the house of lords as well.
Anyway, constitutional change is now all the rage. The prime minister is seriously considering setting up a new Council to work up some ideas, which sounds like a poor man’s Royal Commission until he explains that its members will all be government ministers. Whatever proposals these sages come up with will figure, says Mr Brown, in the Labour Party manifesto for the forthcoming general election; but since it seems increasingly unlikely that after the election there will be a Labour government to implement them, they might not arouse the passionate enthusiasm which they may well deserve (depending, of course, on what they turn out to be). Mr Cameron, Tory prime minister in waiting, tells us that there’s going to be a huge transfer of real power from himself and his fellow MPs and putative future ministers to The People: no doubt he’ll let us know before the election how this is to be achieved, and after the election we shall all be riveted to see whether Dave is just as anxious to get rid of power when he has achieved it as he seems to be when he hasn’t got any. Mr Clegg, for the LibDems, is actually demanding the abolition of the House of Lords (and various other major changes, inevitably including “electoral reform” — he would, wouldn’t he?) before the general election, starting NOW. It can all be done, he has calculated, in 100 days. Ho, hum. How liberating to run no risk of having to lead a government!
Meanwhile all sorts of fancy ideas are being trotted out for our edification: votes for children (no, seriously); open-door primaries for the selection of parliamentary candidates, so that Tories can make sure that only no-hopers are selected as Labour candidates, and vice versa; ‘recall’ of MPs whose performance displeases a given number of their constituents — a field-day for the glassy-eyed environmentalists, anti-abortionists, vegans, English flag-waggers, pacifists, single fathers, flat-earthers and other fanatics (does no-one read Edmund Burke’s address to the electors of Bristol in 1774 any more?); numerous versions of proportional, semi-proportional, and non-proportional electoral systems, many of them with incomprehensible names (what exactly would be the implications of adopting AV-Plus? Is it an anti-virus program? What about d’Hondt?); a wholly elected house of lords, an 80 per cent elected house of lords, a house of hereditary peers only (again), no house of lords at all; fixed-term parliaments (so that governments which no longer enjoy the support of a majority in the house of commons will just have to soldier on and manage as best they can); and so on.
Then there are the minutiae of possible changes in the house of commons itself: clipping the tails of the Whips, or abolishing them; letting MPs choose select committee chairs (hold on, don’t let’s get carried away); giving vast but undefined powers to the select committees; requiring senior official appointments — ambassadors, that sort of thing — to be approved by parliament; letting MPs vote according to their own views in the Committee stage of Bills, not necessarily as ordered by the Whips (but not on Second or Third Reading, naturally); paying MPs more; paying MPs less; reducing the price of drinks in Annie’s Bar; closing (or re-opening) Annie’s Bar. Bolder MPs are not flinching at the prospect of such revolutionary change. (Dozens of others are reportedly enquiring about post-election seats in the house of lords, although the prime minister says he hasn’t heard about that yet.)
What all these disjointed ideas lack is a coherent analysis of the root causes of our present discontents, and ways of tackling them according to an overall strategic plan. I have yet to hear of any proposals, credible or otherwise, for tackling, still less resolving, such fundamental problems as the West Lothian question, devolution for England, or a distinctive function for a second chamber. I put some thoughts on these and other matters in a letter to the Times a few days ago. Since the Times has unaccountably not seen fit to publish it, I’ll have to do it myself. Here it is:
Any worth-while constitutional reform (letters, May 20) needs to address the anomalies caused by incomplete devolution, including the West Lothian question: incomplete reform of the Lords: gross over-centralisation of power at Westminster and Whitehall, distancing politics from ordinary people: and the threat of Scottish secession.
The Westminster parliament currently tries to play two mutually incompatible roles: legislating for England on all subjects, and for the whole of the UK on subjects not devolved to the other three nations. Its composition, like the government’s, is manifestly unsuitable for the first of these; the situation is unsustainable.
The sole solution to all these problems is to complete devolution with a parliament and government for England and the transfer of all domestic subjects to the four nations of the UK, leaving Westminster responsible for little more than foreign affairs and defence under a written constitution — in other words, a fully federal UK similar to the federations in Australia, Germany, the US, Canada and many other comparable countries. We also need maximum devolution of power within the four self-governing nations under the principle of subsidiarity which we demand for Europe.
Such a wide-ranging reform would require inspired leadership and years of preparation, including development of a cross-party, all-UK consensus in its favour and gradual phasing in of the new institutions. But the goal and vision should be set now and a constructive debate begun. Anything less, failing to tackle these momentous issues, will be mere tinkering: a shocking waste of time and opportunity. In Danton’s words: De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!
Alas, what we are now seeing and hearing is precisely “mere tinkering”, devoid of vision, largely designed to serve sectional interests or to assuage a temporary fit of public anger: a failure to think big, or even to attempt to answer any of those basic questions that I had hoped to put to readers of the Times (who they? I hear you cry). But it’s now too late for Labour, which ought to be the natural party of radical reform, to embark on such an epic journey; and there’s precious little sign that Mr Cameron understands the questions, still less that he knows the answers. So we’ll just have to go on muddling through as best we can. That’s what we’re supposed to be good at, isn’t it?
Brian
I have expressed earlier my conviction that it will turn out to be a disaster for Britain if the Tories, having won the general election in a few months’ time, carry out their threat either to hold a referendum on ratification of the Lisbon Treaty if it has not yet been brought into effect at that time, or, if it has, to demand that it be re-opened and re-negotiated.
In discussion of the issues raised by this Conservative Party commitment, not enough attention has perhaps been given to the fact that Britain has completed ratification of the Lisbon treaty, and has lodged the instrument of ratification (as required by EU law) with the Italian government in Rome. Britain has given its formal legal approval to the treaty and will thus be bound by its terms if and when it is brought into effect, probably after a positive vote in the second Irish referendum, at which point the Czechs, Poles and Germans are expected to complete their ratification processes too (none of them requiring a referendum). The treaty would then have been formally approved unanimously by all EU member states and would come into force.
There is a convention in international affairs that after a change of government, the new government continues to observe its obligations under existing treaties, which indeed form part of international law. When there is a coup d’état in (for example) a developing country, the first message passed to the new ruler by anxious western governments is a reminder that he — rarely she — must abide by his country’s existing treaty obligations. The reason is obvious: international law would be a constantly shifting, indefinable muddle — even more incoherent and inchoate[1] than many think it is already — if every new government felt itself free to cherry-pick which treaty obligations to respect, and which to repudiate and “re-negotiate”. Britain has ratified Lisbon, in common with 22 out of the other 26 EU governments, and that should be that.
Of course if Ireland votes No again, or the Czechs, Poles or (improbably) the Germans decline to ratify, the treaty can’t be brought into effect and all bets are off. But that’s not the scenario envisaged in the Conservative Party’s policy commitment.
The convention of respect for existing treaty obligations is not legally binding (as far as I know — perhaps some helpful lawyer will correct me if I’m wrong?) and it’s open to governments under the terms of some treaties to withdraw from them them if they include provision for doing so, or if the circumstances obtaining at the time of the coming into effect of a treaty change so radically that the treaty is clearly no longer applicable. As Wikipedia sagely puts it, -
In public international law, clausula rebus sic stantibus (Latin for “things thus standing”) is the legal doctrine allowing for treaties to become inapplicable because of a fundamental change of circumstances. It is essentially an “escape clause” that makes an exception to the general rule of pacta sunt servanda (promises must be kept).
Someone might remind Messrs Hague and Cameron of the “general rule”: promises must be kept, even if they were originally made by the other side. They are made on behalf of the whole country, not just for one party or for the duration of a particular government. The reaction to any demand for re-negotiation of such a recently ratified treaty by a new British government, or for the withdrawal of our ratification of it, on the part of the majority of our EU partners might well be that if we are no longer satisfied with an essential building-block of the new expanded European Union, approved by every single EU government, then we must exercise our right under the treaty to withdraw from the Union. A more devastating example of the law of unintended consequences (if the Tories mean it when they say they favour continued EU membership) would be hard to find.
This is one more reason for looking askance at this particular element in Conservative Party policy, on top of the likely malign practical consequences for Britain, politically and diplomatically, if the Tories, once elected, go ahead and carry out their threat — see my earlier post on this. Caveat emptor!
Update (30 May 09): Gratifyingly, today’s front-page lead story in the Guardian (“Tragic, unwise: grandees turn on Cameron over plans for EU“) reports that the Conservative party’s EU policies are to be attacked today by a group of senior Tory figures and senior former diplomats:
A group of Tory grandees and former senior diplomats will tomorrow launch a devastating attack on David Cameron’s flagship Eurosceptic policies, warning that they pose a threat to British influence in the European Union.
The group includes Lord (Leon) Brittan (a former Tory home secretary and EU Commissioner), Lord (Christopher) Tugendhat (former Tory MP and EU Commissioner), Lord (Chris) Patten (former Tory MP, Chairman of the Conservative Party and EU Commissioner), Lord (Patrick) Wright (former British ambassador and Head of the Diplomatic Service), and Lord (John) Kerr (former British ambassador to the EU and former Head of the Diplomatic Service). These are all men with direct experience of the EU: they know whereof they speak. As Nicholas Watt’s Guardian article says, –
Retired diplomats are careful about speaking in public. However, the strength of their language reflects Foreign Office concern that Cameron will trigger the worst crisis yet in Britain’s relations with the EU.
Well, I’m not sure that the first part of that is universally true; the second part certainly is. What’s more (no pun intended), this is not simply a question of British “influence” in Europe (easily derided concept): it’s a question of a British government’s ability effectively to defend and promote Britain’s interests in the formulation of EU policies and laws which directly affect the lives of all of us. If we join up with the barmy fringe parties of east and central Europe and thereby alienate the big players and natural allies such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and if we obsessively pursue demands (such as re-opening and re-negotiating a treaty that Britain has formally ratified and which has near-universal support among our partner governments) which stand no chance of gaining majority support in the EU, British interests, not just influence, will be damaged — perhaps terminally.
I’m glad that this issue is now earning banner headlines. I hope my Guardian letter on the subject on 22 May, if not my previous blog post spelling the arguments out at greater length, may have contributed to a growing public awareness of the dangers posed by Mr Cameron’s and Mr Hague’s obstinate commitment to diplomatic suicide.
[1] Inchoate: unfinished, only partially formed (not a pedantic synonym for ‘chaotic’ or ‘incoherent’).
Brian
Unlike most media commentators, with their vested interest in encouraging leaks by civil servants who betray their duty of confidentiality and loyalty to the elected ministers for whom they work, I have very little time for Mr Damian Green, the Conservative MP and shadow minister. Over a period of about two years Mr Green received more than 20 official documents stolen by the home office mole whom he encouraged, at best implicitly, in this nefarious and probably criminal activity. (In deciding not to prosecute either Mr Green or his mole, the Director of Public Prosecutions made it clear that the decision did not imply that no offence had been committed — only that there was insufficient prospect of getting convictions.)
I have written before about this case (e.g. here, here and here) and responded to others’ comments, so I shan’t go over all that ground again. My excuse for returning to the subject now is a remarkable, and little noticed, interview with the mole, Christopher Galley, published in The Times on 19 May under the heading, “‘I did their dirty work and then Tories dumped me’” (heading slightly changed in the online version). The article starts:
For more than a year Christopher Galley, a civil servant, had put his job on the line for the man who had become his political mentor, Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister. Mr Galley, 27, the most prolific Tory mole of modern times, had taken huge risks to smuggle sensitive documents out of the Home Office. But now he had been caught, threatened with imprisonment and fired from his job. It was time, he thought, to call in a few favours.
During one meeting with Mr Green, Mr Galley remembered the MP telling him: “If you are fired, we will look after you.” So, last month, Mr Galley e-mailed him for help. It took four days for the reply to come and when it did it was as cold as ice…
It was an astonishing brush-off for a man whose leaks to the Tories on crime and immigration had repeatedly embarrassed the Government. That ended on November 19 last year when Mr Galley was arrested. Eight days later, police also arrested Mr Green and carried out a raid on his Parliamentary office. Last month, both Mr Galley and Mr Green were relieved to be told by Keir Starmer, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, that they would not face charges over the leaks.
But for Mr Galley there was little reason to celebrate. In an interview with The Times this week, he said that he now felt betrayed by the Conservatives and claimed that he was cynically cultivated as a mole. “I think I have been terribly naive,” Mr Galley said. “I feel as though I have been dumped and they are treating me as political poison, as if they don’t want to touch me now that I have done their dirty work.”
On April 24, the day that his brief Civil Service career ended, Mr Galley wrote to all 193 Conservative MPs in the House of Commons explaining his predicament and asking if any might give him some work. To date, none has been offered. He received no help with the £3,400 legal bill he racked up as a consequence of his arrest and he expects to have to give up his home in Feltham, West London, and move in with his parents. He says his life is in ruins.
“I find it very painful to see the way my leaks have boosted Damian Green’s career while leaving me jobless, broke and with limited prospects,” he said. “Frankly, I feel the Tories have hung me out to dry.”
Remember that the hapless Mr Galley was not a classic whistle-blower in the sense of an insider so angered by knowledge of government wrong-doing that he thought it should be exposed, and risked his career to expose it. For such often worthy people there’s anyway a confidential procedure to be followed within the civil servant’s department, and ultimately in an approach to the head of the civil service, to bring to the attention of the highest official authority the evidence of alleged wrong-doing, before resorting to the ultimate sanction of passing the information to the media, directly or indirectly, without authority. Galley followed no such procedure and it seems quite clear that as a Conservative Party supporter he was mainly concerned to give political ammunition to a front-bench Tory shadow minister for use in embarrassing the government, not primarily publicly to expose wrong-doing.
A key question in assessing the possible criminality of both Mr Galley’s and Mr Green’s activities is whether Damian Green actually asked or encouraged Galley to steal and pass over official home office documents, or whether Galley acted spontaneously, without encouragement, with Damian Green purely a passive recipient. The Times interview casts valuable new light on this:
Mr Galley’s painful foray into the world of political dirty tricks began with an astonishing meeting with David Davis, then the Shadow Home Secretary, and ended unceremoniously with a dawn raid by anti-terror police. Mr Galley … had been a civil servant for only three months when he was invited to Mr Davis’s office at the Commons in May 2006. … Mr Galley was working at the Border and Immigration Agency, now the UK Border Agency, in Hounslow, West London, helping to process applications from asylum seekers. He had read an article on immigration posted by Mr Davis on the Conservative Party website and left a message on the site agreeing with the article and making a few suggestions. To his amazement, he received an e-mail asking him to meet the Shadow Home Secretary. “The invitation was to Davis’s Commons office,” said Mr Galley, who was then aged 24 and in the lowest rank of the Civil Service. [...]
“In the invitation it said, ‘Our immigration spokesman wants to be there as well’,” Mr Galley went on. “At the time I didn’t have a clue who he was. So this balding bloke turns up at the meeting. It was Damian Green. I felt pretty intimidated. You had two senior politicians and a researcher sitting in a room and you have all this imposing architecture around you. And you have one of them sitting at one side and another at the other side and you’ve got questions coming from one and then the other.
“David Davis started off with the introductions and he basically wanted an explanation of what my role actually was. I told him I was only an admin assistant and I explained what I felt was wrong with the reporting centre where I worked. Damian Green then spoke about how he wanted to improve immigration and he said to keep in touch in the future.” Asked whether he was ever explicitly asked to leak items by Mr Green, Mr Galley said: “He didn’t say that. I said that I could send some ideas in on how things could be improved. He said he would like that.”
In the following months, Mr Galley says, he wrote about seven letters to Mr Green with ideas and suggestions, and the MP wrote back encouragingly. “I got replies throughout the year,” said Mr Galley. “He sent two or three letters saying, ‘Keep up the good work’ and there was a letter at Christmas.”
In July 2007, Mr Galley was promoted to administration officer at the Home Office and told Mr Green of his progress. He was responsible for administration in the private office of Tony McNulty, then the minister responsible for policing and crime, and Vernon Coaker, an under-secretary of state and government whip. “One day, I was sitting in Vernon’s office and . . . a private secretary to Vernon and one of the assistant private secretaries were dealing with a matter relating to the Security Industry Authority [which licenses workers in the security industry],” he said. “They were looking at this document to do with how licences had been granted to asylum seekers to work in the SIA. But rather than trying to put a stop to that, these two people were actually trying to co-ordinate . . . a damage limitation exercise on how to keep it quiet, which I didn’t think was right. I got my hands on that document . . . copied it to my hard drive, then saved it and copied it to my Hotmail address and sent it to Damian Green. A day later it was published in a newspaper. I was pretty shocked. Damian telephoned me and said, ‘Well done. This is pretty explosive stuff’’.”
Buoyed by the encouragement, Mr Galley continued to leak.
This is only one side’s version of events: Damian Green denies parts of it. But the general pattern seems clear enough.
Some conclusions can be drawn, I think, from all this.
First, good and coherent government, which depends among other things on a relationship of mutual trust between ministers and their officials, would be impossible if all, or a significant number of, civil servants felt free to steal official information and pass it to opposition MPs for party political purposes, claiming the right to substitute their own political opinions for the judgement of elected ministers as to what information should be released and when.
Secondly, Mr Galley doesn’t seem to have initiated the relationship with David Davis and Damian Green, who began it with their surprise invitation to Galley to go and meet them. The two Tory MPs seem to have been careful not to ask Galley explicitly to send them documents without authority, presumably knowing that to do so would risk laying them open to criminal charges. But the distinction between an explicit request and implicit encouragement is surely rather blurred — as the DPP implied by stressing that the decision not to prosecute didn’t necessarily mean that no offence had been committed.
Thirdly, against the background of systematic leaking from a minister’s private office in the home office to an opposition MP and thence into the public domain, a police investigation was absolutely inevitable — as the DPP himself also said. A police investigation into the possibility of an offence by Damian Green was bound to involve questioning him and searching his computers and papers in a way which denied him or his staff any opportunity to hide or destroy potentially incriminating evidence beforehand, as any other questioning of a possible suspect must do. Criticism of the Speaker and other House of Commons authorities for permitting this (one of the charges laid against Mr Speaker Martin) is seriously misplaced. They would have been open to the charge of obstructing the police in their enquiries, or obstructing the course of justice, had they sought to prevent the police from doing their duty. It’s true that the police didn’t have an ordinary search warrant, but explicit permission to conduct the search given by a high parliamentary official responsible for security, probably given after consulting the Speaker, was surely even better than a magistrate’s search warrant.
Fourthly, Mr Green is a lucky man to have got away with acting as he did, systematically and over a period of at least two years, with complete impunity, indeed emerging at the end of the process with the wholly undeserved status of both hero and victim of allegedly improper treatment at the hands of the police, when the police self-evidently couldn’t have acted otherwise than as they did.
Fifthly, Mr Galley, who took such personal risks on behalf of the party which he supported, with what sounds like encouragement from two of its senior leaders, has turned out to be a lot less lucky than Mr Green, his mentor. He obviously behaved badly vis-à-vis his employers over an extended period, inevitably thereby damaging his chances of finding another job after being dismissed from the civil service; but it’s impossible not to feel just a tiny bit sorry for him.
And lastly, if and when Mr Green and perhaps Mr Davis are appointed ministers in a Conservative government under David Cameron, probably some time next year, it will be extremely interesting to see whether they take the same relaxed view if one of their trusted civil servants turns out to be a committed Labour Party supporter who starts leaking official documents to the Labour opposition front bench, for use against them.
Brian
One of the strongest of many reasons for not voting Conservative in the European Parliament elections on 4 June or, especially, in the impending general election is the Tory threat to hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, something that’s not only weirdly irrelevant (Britain has already ratified the treaty) but also potentially disastrous for Britain in its likely consequences.
Today’s Guardian (22 May 09) publishes my letter on this subject (text here) from which I hope the main points emerge clearly enough. I make no complaint about the usual editorial abbreviations of the letter as originally submitted, although inevitably they have ironed out some significant nuances. Here is the full text as sent to the Guardian:
Sir,
You’re clearly right to warn against voting for a Conservative Party hell-bent on deserting the centre-right mainstream group in the European parliament in favour of a new rag-tag far-right grouping (Conservatives: continental drift, editorial, May 20). But another even more cogent reason not to vote Conservative is David Cameron’s reckless pledge to hold a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty if it hasn’t yet come into effect when (or if) he becomes prime minister. Every single government in the EU supports the treaty as an essential reform following the recent expansion of the EU, and in the light of guarantees now being negotiated there’s a good chance that Ireland will vote to ratify it in a second referendum, followed by the handful of other countries which have not completed ratification pending Ireland’s decision. Britain however, unlike Ireland, has already ratified the treaty and formally lodged the ratification instrument with Rome: it’s not a law and can’t simply be repealed or otherwise reversed, so a referendum would probably have no legal effect although its political impact could be devastating.
With the right-wing tabloids and much of the rest of the media psychotically Europhobic, and the Tories officially campaigning against the treaty, the result of a UK referendum would be almost a foregone conclusion. This act of wanton and quite unnecessary sabotage would wreck Britain’s standing in Europe. Few of our partners would accept the demise of an essential reform treaty solely because of a UK veto. The end result could well be Britain’s de facto expulsion from the European Union — something that even the Tory leadership claims not to want.
Every vote for the Conservatives, indeed every abstention from voting, either on 4 June or at next year’s general election, risks helping to precipitate this potential disaster.
Yours sincerely
Brian Barder
I’m grateful once again to Peter Harvey for bringing me up to date on the current position regarding ratifications of the Lisbon Treaty and progress towards a second referendum in Ireland:
The UK has indeed lodged the [instrument of ratification of the] treaty, in Rome. I think that was because it all started with the Treaty of Rome. Anyway,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7511281.stm
There is no way, apart from renegotiation, that the UK can get out of it.The Lisbon Treaty has been ratified by all countries except the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany, as well as Ireland. In the first two of those countries it has been passed by parliament but is awaiting the presidential signature, and both presidents are Eurosceptics. In fact, they are waiting for the result of the Irish referendum. If that is for the treaty, they will really have no choice but to sign. In Germany the Constitutional Court has yet to pronounce on it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8037441.stm[....]
There is also the British view that anything can be repealed, which
stems from the UK having no constitutional mechanism providing for things that can’t be, or indeed things that need a qualified majority. Brits don’t like the idea of binding commitments.
It’s boringly predictable that among the comments on my letter on the Guardian‘s website, and probably on this post here, will be the charge of arrogance and contempt for democracy in seeking to deprive the British people of their right to express their views on an allegedly controversial treaty which its critics claim will transfer yet more power from Britain to Brussels. But there’s no substance to any such complaint. The decision not to hold a referendum did not, as alleged, break the Labour Party’s promise to allow a referendum on the proposed new EU Constitution treaty: the Lisbon version is self-evidently a different document and not a constitution, whatever else it might be. The ratification procedure for Lisbon — approval of ratification by both houses of parliament — was the same as that used for the much more far-reaching Maastricht treaty, and other EU treaties which have collectively shaped the EU as it is today. Britain has legally ratified Lisbon, and that should be that: no possible need for a referendum on a decision already taken, and no point in holding one.
But the clinching argument is the likely consequences of holding a referendum, which (as argued in my Guardian letter) would be potentially disastrous for Britain. Political leaders must be held responsible for assessing the probable consequences of their actions and policies, just as the rest of us are. The Tories’ persistence in demanding and promising a procedurally irrelevant referendum on the Lisbon treaty, despite its appalling risks, is bound to arouse the suspicion that it represents a limp surrender by Cameron to the serious Europhobes in his party, probably led by the shadow (and presumably future) foreign secretary, William Hague: people whose real aim is to end UK membership of the European Union. That suspicion is greatly aggravated by the Tories’ parallel (and almost equally damaging) promise to leave the mainstream centre-right group in the European parliament and to form a new far-right and essentially anti-EU group with some pretty unsavoury allies, especially from east and central Europe. The Guardian’s editorial on that subject, referred to in my letter, makes an unanswerable case against the Tories on those grounds too.
Update (24 May 09): Over on the always interesting Labour List blog, this post (reproduced there) has attracted a sizeable volume of comments, all of them hostile, many savagely so. Even when you put aside those which are merely hysterical or scurrilous, there’s still a sizeable body of opinion (represented in a blog designed for “Labour minded people” to debate issues and exchange views) which is viscerally hostile to the European enterprise of which Britain is a part, which wilfully blinds itself to the likely consequences for our country and for the rest of Europe of a British referendum on the Lisbon treaty resulting in its rejection, and which has persuaded itself that if Britain alone is out of step with the rest of the EU on the procedural reforms made necessary by EU expansion, the rest of Europe will just have to come round to the British point of view — and will meekly do so. How adults can indulge themselves with this kind of fantasy is a rather worrying mystery, but there it is. Anyway, it’s easy enough to dismiss my views (as some comments on Labour List do) as ignorant, arrogant, riddled with error, sad, and just cause for having me strung up. Labour bloggers in Labour territory need thick skins! The authors of such comments might, however, care to spend five minutes reading Will Hutton‘s sobering article in today’s Observer, which (dare I say?) reproduces many of my own points but in even starker language. Extracts:
Europe remains the Tory modernisers’ blind spot. David Cameron and William Hague must know the risk they are running. They know, or should know, that a referendum on the EU constitutional treaty once every member state has signed it, as is likely this autumn if the Irish vote yes in a second referendum, is a European suicide note; 26 other countries are not going to spend another three years ratifying another treaty amended to meet David Cameron’s and his party’s prejudices. They are condemned to tell Britain that while some cosmetic concessions may be made, essentially the body of the treaty must stand.
If the British hold a referendum and there is a no vote, then the consequence will be that Britain must withdraw from the EU. So either this is a one-off stunt which the party leadership knows it must retreat from once the treaty is signed off or a ploy it knows will lead to a yes or no vote on de-facto European Union membership within two years of winning next year’s election. Either way, it hardly inspires much confidence.
So these European parliamentary elections really matter. … Along with the BNP, the opinion polls suggest that more than 50% of the vote will go to anti-EU parties. I’m not sure the British know the consequence of their vote, but a dynamic is in train that will lead to our exit from the EU.
As a pro-European, I don’t want this to happen, but I’ve begun to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for Europe. Only living outside the EU as the sceptics want – creating a politically diminished Britain fit for hedge funds, tax-avoiders and asset-strippers – is likely to convince the British majority that the option is a disaster.
Meanwhile, the Europeans can deepen the EU, along the way empowering the European Parliament. When a Tory government leads an impoverished, embittered Britain back into the EU in 25 years’ time, reality will have imposed political maturity. And elections for the European Parliament will be much more serious. [Emphasis added]
“Sad”? Well, yes. Sometimes the truth is sad.
Brian
J and I are just back from a three-day short break in Bruges. Our Bruges pictures are on Flickr at –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianlb/sets/72157618576894874/. If that doesn’t load, click http://bit.ly/Q4x6v instead.
To view the pictures in a decent size, click ‘Slideshow‘ (near the top right of the screen), and when the first picture appears, quickly click the pause button ( || ) at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. Then click “Show info” at the top right to see the captions of those pictures that have them (the more interesting ones do). Now click the small square with arrows in the middle pointing out to the four corners, at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, to get the picture in full screen view. Finally, click ‘next‘ (top centre) to see the next picture, and repeat when ready.
It’s much simpler than it looks.
By all means write comments under any pictures that amuse or annoy you.
It was a pleasure to see something of Bruges, a fantastically well preserved and beautiful little city, although hard on ageing feet. We went with Riviera Travel, a small English travel company, whose guide was admirably informative, unobtrusive, friendly and above all remarkably calm. The Academie hotel where we were all accommodated (only 27 of us, a manageable sized group) was nicely situated and perfectly adequate for a three-night stay, although not deserving its four star status (you really do need to take your own coffee, milk and mugs to make any use of the kettle in your room, and the hot food and orange juice for breakfast were terrible). The staff though are helpful and friendly. There are dozens of restaurants nearby for lunches and dinners, ranging from excellent to OK. Don’t miss out on the splendid Belgian moules frites and the high quality steaks. Luckily hardly anyone from outside Flanders speaks Flemish so all the locals who need to talk to foreign visitors (aka tourists) speak very good English (and French, German, etc.). The weather was changeable — we all got drenched in a sudden downpour when retrieving our bags from the coach on arrival from the appalling Lille Europe railway station — but mostly very good. It was mid-May.
And don’t on any account miss the tour of the First World War battlefields, including a visit to the war museum and the Menin Gate in Ypres, about an hour away by coach from Bruges. The Zot brewery in Bruges also merits a visit, including the accompanying glass of Zot Blond, if and when you get tired of half-litre glasses of delectable Leffe Brune. Michaelangelo’s exquisite Madonna and Child in the Church of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk) is a must-see: our pictures on Flickr include two photographs of it. We couldn’t see the collection of Van Eycks in the Groeninge Museum because only a temporary exhibition of something else was open. The chocolate factory and shop that we visited was remarkable mainly for its lack of elementary hygiene: staff hands, ungloved, wiped noses and then scooped up dainty chocolates. UK Health & Safety would have fainted. Be sure to watch the splendid film In Bruges on DVD before you go.
However, most readers of this doubtless know Bruges intimately already and will be in no need of these recommendations. If such Bruges aficionados find that this account is full of misleading information and shows that we missed out on all the best things in Bruges, please don’t tell us: we don’t wish to know that.
Brian
The Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, made a statement this afternoon (11 May 09) on MPs’ expenses, and took a number of points of order on the subject. This must have been one of the most extraordinary performances from the Speaker’s chair in modern times.
My wife, not easily moved to semi-public protest, has sent this message to our (Labour) MP:
I hope that after Speaker Martin’s disgraceful performance this afternoon you will support those who are trying to persuade him to step down. I think that most dispassionate observers feel that he has done the Commons a disservice by the way he has handled the question of MPs’ expenses and allowances from the time that it first arose in the House. But to call in the police to investigate leaks is surely now a complete misjudgement of the public’s need to trust their MPs: there are many who are beginning to wonder whether the police should rather be called in to investigate the activities of their MPs – not you, I hasten to add. And then to attack Kate Hoey and Norman Baker, two MPs making perfectly valid points of order, was completely unacceptable. I think the House has tolerated him long enough.
J. might also have mentioned Speaker Martin’s brutal response to a perfectly sensible question from Patricia Hewitt: in the words of The Times report, –
He then curtly dismissed Patricia Hewitt, the former Health Secretary, for suggesting that “citizens’ juries” be brought in to give the discussions public legitimacy.
But it was the Speaker’s angry and sarcastic attacks on Kate Hoey and Norman Baker that seemed both astonishing and indefensible. The same Times report commented justly that this was “the first time in recent history that the chair has made personal criticisms of members without provocation.” Ms Hoey’s offence was to have suggested that the police had more pressing things to do than to mount an investigation into the leak of the information about MPs’ expenses claims to the Daily Telegraph. This prompted a tirade from the Speaker who seemed far more outraged by the leak of sensitive personal information about MPs than he was about the way a defective system had been systematically abused and exploited by a raft of MPs of at least two major parties and possibly more. (A video clip of part of the attack on Ms Hoey is also included in the online version of the same Times report; there is a clip of the Speaker’s initial statement here.) It’s not often that this blog quotes the Daily Mail approvingly, but this report gives the flavour:
… instead of expressing regret, [the Speaker] yesterday launched a series of ill-tempered attacks on members who dared to question his handling of the crisis. Challenged by Labour’s Kate Hoey over the wisdom of his decision to call in police to investigate the leak of expenses data, the Speaker appeared to lose control of his emotions. He breached the historic Parliamentary convention that the Speaker should never mount personal attacks on MPs. Mr Martin told Miss Hoey, a former Sports Minister, that he had endured her ‘pearls of wisdom’ late at night on TV news channels. ‘It’s easy to talk then,’ he snapped. ‘It’s easy to say to the press this should not happen – it’s a wee bit more difficult when you don’t just have to give quotes to the press and nothing else.’
The Speaker’s preoccupation with the leak, and his determination to bring the leaking miscreant to justice, are surely misconceived. If ever there was a ‘public interest’ defence, this has got to be it. The bulk of the information leaked was due to be published officially within a few weeks anyway, by order of the courts and the Freedom of Information Commissioner, despite fierce opposition from the Speaker on behalf of most MPs — not however including Kate Hoey or Norman Baker, both of whom have consistently spoken out against the attempt to keep the information under wraps (nudge, nudge). The part of the information that was still going to be withheld was the addresses to which the expense claims related. But if we had had the information on claims without the addresses, one of the worst of MPs’ abuses — constantly changing the ‘second homes’ for which expenses were claimed — would have been hidden from view. It’s difficult to imagine a jury convicting whoever was responsible for outing this shabby behaviour, verging on corruption, by a considerable number of MPs. MP after MP now declares that ‘the system is rotten’: even Mr Speaker Martin accepts that it will have to be changed. But the real offence that has roused such public anger and contempt is not so much the rottenness of the system (although that too) as some MPs’ extensive abuse and exploitation of that system for personal gain. If the Speaker can’t understand that key point, it’s hard to see how he can exercise his leadership role in a way that will gradually restore a degree of public confidence, not just in individual MPs but also in the parliamentary system, and ultimately in politics itself. If anyone doubts the depth of public disillusionment, he has only to read the ferocious comments on an earlier blog post of mine in Ephems, reproduced in Labour List, in which I ventured to suggest that MPs were relatively poorly paid. If I were an MP, some of these comments would surely drive me to ask for extra police protection — at the taxpayers’ expense, of course.
Stop press: tomorrow’s batch of fresh revelations by the Daily Telegraph will apparently include a claim by a prominent Tory MP for repairs to his moat. His moat!
As for the Speaker, as usual my wife has succinctly said it all.
Brian
The Daily Telegraph has undeniably pulled off a great coup in getting hold of the details of MPs’ expenses claims and publishing them. It’s doing it in dribs and drabs, starting today, thus pre-empting the official plan to publish them all together in July, after the elections in June to the European parliament and the county councils. “MPs’ expenses: ‘lack of moral leadership’ revealed by politicians“, shouts the Telegraph’s front page headline, leading into predictably grubby revelations about the claims made by a number of Labour ministers. By selecting this group for the first day’s revelations, the Daily Torygraph ensures that the widest media coverage will concentrate on dubious expenses claims made exclusively by Labour front-benchers: revelations about past claims by Tory and LibDem front- and back-benchers are being reserved for later, when public interest and outrage have begun to die down through inevitable indignation fatigue. In this way the newspaper will hope to inflict maximum damage on Labour’s performance in the June elections, although all the signs are that this will anyway be so dire that the Telegraph’s latest campaign can hardly make it any worse.
Of course there can be no excuse for some of the self-serving, rule-bending claims that the Telegraph’s first set of revelations lays bare today. A shamefully large number of MPs of all parties, on front and back benches, have apparently behaved carelessly at one end of the spectrum, and probably semi-corruptly at the other, with all kinds of petty fiddling in between, most if not all of it technically within the letter of the rules (which MPs themselves have of course approved), but in some cases miles outside their spirit. Moreover, whatever its underlying political motives, the Telegraph can’t be blamed for having procured (stolen?) and published the information, either: it’s self-evidently in the public interest that these matters should be available to us so that we can revisit our opinions of those caught with at least a couple of greedy fingers in the till. And because the Telegraph has got the addresses to which the claims and payments relate (information that was not intended for publication), it can uncover the sly dodges that some MPs have been up to more effectively than it could have done without them.
And yet, and yet. The whole scandal, especially after the detailed but partial revelations published today, has unleashed a predictable fire-storm of outrage and demonisation, not just of those identified today and in recent weeks as having fiddled or finessed their expenses, but of politicians as a class, especially but not exclusively focusing on Labour politicians (because it’s somehow deemed even more despicable to behave like this if you’re in government), and therefore of politics as a whole. The blogosphere is humming with contempt for the whole breed. So are the tabloids, and much of the broadsheets. Phone-in programmes on radio and television are receiving buckets of bile to pour over politicians’ heads. The illustrious ‘Guido Fawkes’ (not his real name), über-blogger and publisher of the smears of prominent Tories and their wives, goes to town with talk of villains, shame and charades; the Guido fan club, faithfully following his cue, falls into line with a raft of ‘comments’ — 134 at the last count — of which the following, all posted anonymously, is a representative sample:
Hang the fuckers!
It’s all unravelling. So is this whole fucking charade of ‘public service’. Nice one to the whistle-blowers, moles and other dirt-diggers.
This isn’t just an abuse of the system, it’s wholesale theft and criminal deception. In any other line of work she’d be helping the Fraud Squad with their inquiries. ……” Perhaps Redditch Open Prison should be her 2nd home for a while ???
cabinet snouts in the trough
(But one refreshing note of dissent:
‘Not foaming at the mouth‘ says:
“This whole thing bores me Guido, a lot of hot wind and self righteous puritanism.”)
But it’s not really merely ‘boring’. It’s calculated to bring our whole political system into disrepute, just at the very time when we need to support our political leaders, most of them decent and honest men and women trying to make the world a better place, in their efforts to salvage something from the current financial and economic disaster. My own contribution by way of a comment on ‘Guido’s’ blog post (not yet available on his blog, but perhaps it will surface eventually), posted under my own name, was:
The worst thing about these revelations of petty venality on the part of some of our politicians is that they reinforce the general disillusionment with our politics and our politicians, just at the time when we desperately need widespread public support for action by governments everywhere (and governments are staffed by politicians) to get us through a massive global financial and economic crisis caused by a handful of much greedier private sector financiers, not at all by politicians. Bloggers, and the parasites who merely comment on blogs (mostly skulking behind pseudonyms), might pause before they join in the sneering clamour of contempt and hatred of our politicians, to consider whether a few injudicious claims for bath plugs and new boilers for second homes are really so much more wicked than the money-grubbing greed and deliberate obfuscations of what the bankers and hedge fund managers and co. were doing with other people’s money to make millions for themselves while bringing down the whole financial system on which millions all over the world depended. Let’s keep this thing in perspective, OK?
Being an MP is a gruelling and demanding job: the mountain of dreary but inescapable constituency work requires you to be a social worker and legal adviser without any training or preparation for either role; working hours in the house of commons, although reformed, are still unsocial; the vast majority of the proceedings in the House and its committees are unspeakably tedious; the long separations from family and friends famously tend to lead to marital break-up, alcoholism and worse; the lack of real power over an over-mighty executive saps energy and will-power; dependence on the favour of the Whips for any chance of advancement to ministerial office is degrading; those who achieve it are generally unfitted for it, since ministerial success requires quite different talents from those needed to win a constituency election; many of your fellow-MPs will always be uncongenial company; you have little or no job security and your ability to hold onto your seat every three or four years depends on circumstances quite beyond your control; you are fairly poorly paid and if you make up for this by claiming all the allowances that parliamentary officials tell you you’re entitled to, you’re likely to be lampooned across the nation’s front pages and television screens as little better than a bank robber or hedge fund manager. No wonder the intellectual and charismatic cream of the population would rather be water-boarded than submit to the rigours and penalties of such a career.
But these are the people on whom we depend for rescue from the depredations of free market capitalism. Like the coal miners of the past, they do a job that few of us would be willing to do, but one that for all our sakes has to be done by someone. It behoves us to treat them more fairly and even — some of them, anyway — with just a hint of respect.
Brian
The dry statistics of unemployment figures tend to mask the human suffering that lies behind them: men and women losing the jobs that helped to define them, in some cases with little prospect of ever finding employment again; the dire effects on wives, husbands and children, and other dependents; the dizzy drop in living standards; the pressing danger of losing your home, perhaps for good; the consequences for your and your family’s physical and mental health; the loss of status and self-respect — and all resulting from changes in circumstances over which the victims have absolutely no control, and for which they have absolutely no responsibility.
Those dry figures give some idea of the sheer size of the disaster. The latest US job figures are terrible, although apparently not quite as bad as expected. According to the Washington Post on 8 May 09, –
Unemployment Rate Jumps to 8.9 Percent
U.S. employers shed 539,000 jobs in April, less than expected.The ranks of Americans looking for work continued to swell in April, as the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 8.9 percent, the Labor Department reported this morning.
Although it is the highest jobless rate since September, 1983, the pace of job losses slowed appreciably last month compared to February and March, another sign that the severe economic slump may be starting to ease.
The number of private sector jobs fell by 611,000 the report said, but that loss was offset somewhat by the addition of 72,000 government jobs — most of them connected with the 2010 census. The total of 539,000 jobs lost was slightly less than the 600,000 expected by analysts.
Some experts predicted the jobs report would beat expectations after the ADP Employment Report released earlier this week showed a job loss of 491,000 in April, far lower than the 600,000-plus tallies seen in prior months. [Emphasis added]
So in one month, in one country, around half a million Americans have lost their jobs — which probably means that some two million people (including dependents) have seen their lives reduced to ruins. In just a month!
So far the UK figures are considerably less bad in percentage terms, although there’s always the malign possibility that we’ll catch up, and in any case they are appalling in themselves. According to the Human Resource Management Guide, –
April 22 2009 – The [UK] unemployment rate rose to 6.7% — up 0.6% over the quarter and 1.5% on last year. 29.3 million people were in work in the period December to February according to the labour force survey (LFS). The number of people employed fell by 126,000 this quarter and down by 227,000 on the last year.
The working age employment rate is 73.8% – down 0.4% on the last quarter and down 1.1% on the last year.
ILO-defined unemployment in December to February was 2.1 million (6.7%) – up by 177,000 unemployed on the quarter and 486,000 from this time last year.
The claimant count for key out-of-work benefits was 1,464,100 in March – up by 73,700 on last month, and up 672,100 on last year.
When you consider that comparable numbers of working people have lost or are losing their jobs all over the western world, and in many other parts of the world, the cost of the ‘recession’ — or ‘slump’, as the Washington Post rightly calls it — in human misery for the (unnecessarily) unemployed and their families is truly tragic. On top of this, the global economic collapse is doing even greater damage to the world’s poorest people in the developing world, especially in Africa. As Owen Barder writes from Addis Ababa, –
Africa is least to blame for the crisis, but may be worst hit. There are three reasons for this:
- Developing countries are disproportionately dependent on very volatile resources: earnings from primary commodities, private capital flows, remittances and aid; so a downturn in the world economy will hit their economies hard;
- Developing countries have the least room for manoeuvre to offset these temporary effects: for example, they are less able to borrow. How is a cash-strapped developing country, constrained to pursue tight fiscal policies by donor conditions, supposed to respond to the downturn?
- The effects on the welfare of people in developing countries as a result of these economic problems will be much bigger and more permanent than the corresponding effects on the people in industrialised countries. Most of them have no insurance or savings to fall back on, no safety net to catch them, nowhere to move to find a new job. If they cannot send their daughter to school, or sell their ox, the effect may be to plunge an entire generation into a lifetime of poverty.
It’s sickening to reflect that this huge disaster has been caused virtually entirely by the collapse of the free market financial system, not by global warming, harvest failures, floods, wildfires, pandemic, freak weather conditions, wars, meteor strike or the exhaustion of essential natural resources. The miscalculations, short-termism, greed and lack of social responsibility of a handful of rich men in a tiny number of countries has visited this calamity on us. There must be a better way.
Brian
An interesting epilogue to the MacBride smear e-mails saga: Gordon Brown’s personal letter of apology to Nadine Dorries, the Tory MP defamed in the e-mail, has been published in full-size facsimile by the Daily Mail in an article of 15 April by Ian Drury:
A post by John Sutherland on the Guardian’s Mortarboard blog speculates about whether this remarkable document reveals that our prime minister may be dyslexic. (According to his own mini-biography on the blog, John Sutherland is ‘Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at UCL (“emeritus” being Latin for “scrapheap” and “Northcliffe” journalistic shorthand for “you cannot be serious”). He currently teaches at the California Institute of Technology and is the author of twenty-odd books…’)
The professor emeritus points out:
Any teacher, at whatever level, might have experienced a jolt of recognition on looking at Gordon Brown’s cacographic scrawl, drawing the astonished question: “Is the most powerful man in Britain dyslexic – and if so, how on earth did he keep it secret so long?” There were several misspellings in a handwritten note of some 70 words, including the addressee’s surname (“Dorres”), “politcal”, “knowlege”, “embarassment” and “advizer”. There was also the symptomatic cover-up of the dyslexic: the impenetrable handwriting, in which an odd guessed-at-but-wrong spelling can be tactically camouflaged.
It could, of course, have been an attack of stress dyslexia: something that typically afflicts pupils under the pressure of three-hour desk examinations. One spells best when one is relaxed. But it seems more likely that the inability of this most knowledgeable politician to spell “knowledge”or “political” is constitutional, not occasional.
(“Cacographic” is rather good, I think.)
There is also the worrying problem of the left-leaning slope of the prime minister’s handwriting, on which Sutherland recalls that when the handwriting experts were called in to examine the manuscript letter, “there was a lot of guff about the backward slope of the script indicating anal-retentiveness, paranoia, even incipient nervous breakdown.” But he concludes that:
The reason Brown writes as he now does is, one assumes, is that he changed his writing style after the terrible injury he suffered playing rugby in his last year at school. He now angles his script backwards the better to see it with his good eye, which he uses by swivelling his head sharply to the left. It is, however, implausible that his spelling was affected by the accident. But, take heart Britain. … Churchill was also dyslexic.
The Daily Mail article helpfully provided a corrected text of the Dorries letter for those of us who couldn’t decipher the manuscript version:
Part of the explanation for the deficiencies of this short letter must relate to Mr Brown’s rugby accident and the loss of the sight of one eye, as Professor Sutherland suggests. But it’s tempting to guess that another part of the explanation might be the prime minister’s profound aversion to making an apology, causing him to scrawl the letter in extreme haste and mental turmoil. Like the disastrous YouTube clip about MPs’ expenses, this dreadful letter surely ought to have been intercepted by a No. 10 private secretary or adviser with the discreet suggestion that the prime minister might consider re-writing it. Are they all so scared of him that no-one dares to save him from himself? What else are private secretaries for? Or is he surrounded by private secretaries and political advisers who are secretly quite relaxed about their boss’s apparent determination to self-destruct? Perish the thought.
Brian
The prime minister decided last week to announce his new policy on MPs’ expenses by posting a clip on YouTube. I defy anyone to watch it through without falling about with incredulous laughter. Is it possible that no-one in No. 10 had the gumption to step in and prevent this suicidal venture into no longer very new technology, especially when the subject matter alone obviously required the announcement to be made in the House of Commons?
Prime Minister on MPs\’ expenses
Brian
