They didn’t used to be known as Nazis for nothing you know.

This is a nonsense article. You seem to be becoming increasing shrill and desperate.

You also miss the point; figures in the civil service are meant to be politically neutral and are meant to carry out the orders of their Cabinet Ministers. An incoming Conservative government will face significant opposition from the state apparatus which they would have won control of through the legitimate public democratic process. It would be equally abhorrent to see civil service members take a publicly right wing line.

Quite – you just don’t get it do you. He is not meant to be activist of any sort. The politicians are the activists. Civil Servants like the head of the CPS are meant to be politically neutral, like the, er, BBC. This is, partly, because they are not accountable to the population in the way that the politicians are. Simple really, if you can understand it.

The trouble is the politicisation of both the civil service and of the ever-burgeoning quangocracy. It started under Thatcher, increased under Blair and Brown also has loved getting his placemen/women in situ.What goes around comes around. had Blair (unlikely) or Brown put a stop to this politicisation process, and reverted to public neutrality in public positions then we wouldn’t be facing the prospect of those positions being filled (as they will be) by Tories over the next few years.Typical NewLab: can’t see beyond what benefits the party, and so embark on actions that will rebound on them in due course.

Montgomerie is a neo Conservative twat. He has never had an original idea in his life. He just repeats American Republican talking points.

But always nice to see brownshirts behaving like brownshirts.

This is the future under call me Dave. dissent will not be tolerated. Watch your neighbours or your work mates, they might all be reporting back to Chairman Montgomerie and his gang of goons.

Real charming set of commentators on ConHome, aren’t they?

Proper warms the heart it does.

Keir was involved like me in Socialist Self-Management that published Socialist Alternative, not very sinster….Peter Tatchell was involved as well. 1989 is a while ago, I suspect my politics have not changed very much since then but 20 is not a short time.

DPP was in left group with Peter Tatchell in 1989 so? It was socialist self-management, pretty libertarian left.

How on earth is Keir Starmer meant to judge which MPs and Lords should be prosecuted when he has such an obvious and pronounced political bias? I don’t think you guys would appreciate a judge or a prosecutor taking an openly pro-Tory position.

Of course, I don’t think the fundamental problem lies with Starmer himself. i think it is the more the nature of his position, and the incredibly centralised nature of our prosecution system.

“I don’t think you guys would appreciate a judge or a prosecutor taking an openly pro-Tory position.”

Most judges are closet tories. That is the real class war that is waged in this country.

Just like the way the Tory party picks director generals of the BBC who are Tory, but the big con here is that the individual never admits his tory bias. Not naming names, but certain BBC director generals who are supposedly indedpendent, but then get awarded knighthoods by tory prime Ministers.

Poor old Greg Dyke, who admits, quite openly of his Labour bias, and then stands up against the lies of a Labour govt is hounded out of office by clandestine tory appointed scum.

sally – would you support elected judges, much as America has? There’s a lot of moaning in your post but very little in the way of offering solutions.

You also miss the point; figures in the civil service are meant to be politically neutral and are meant to carry out the orders of their Cabinet Ministers.

First, there’s no indication he’s being politically biased. Secondly, Chris Grayling is not the cabinet minister.

The interview with Starmer on which the Telegraph relies (but does not cite) is with Martha Kearney on World at One, 14mins in, or 24mins in wrt the Hussain case / self defence. It’s a shame the BBC and Telegraph claim Starmer “rejected” Tory plans. Starmer seems very careful about his language (e.g. from Q165 here) and this interview was no exception.

What he said is that he “cannot see any case for changing the law [on self defence] at this stage.”* Indeed no case has been made, has it?

Starmer said: “The law is that reasonable force can be used and if the householder makes a mistake they will be protected because they will be judged on the basis of the mistake that they made. … What the law doesn’t allow is for individuals after the event, having pursued someone who may or may not have been an intruder, then to seek some sort of summary justice. As the judge recognised in the Hussain case, which involved beating severely an individual, we can’t allow our system to be undermined by those exacting summary judgment in that way.”

In 2005 his predecessor Ken MacDonald said,

“On an informal trawl the CPS has only been able to find 11 cases in the last 15 years where people have been prosecuted for attacking intruders into houses, commercial premises or private land. Only 7 of these appear to have resulted from domestic household burglaries.”

Sadly he didn’t say how many cases overall there were of self defence, but I suspect there are rather more than 11. The CPS did provide us with examples of cases where they didn’t prosecute the householder (or equivalent):

“Householder/other victim not prosecuted
Robbery at a newsagent’s. One of the two robbers died after being stabbed by the newsagent. The CPS did not prosecute the newsagent but prosecuted the surviving robber who was jailed for six years (Greater Manchester);
A householder returned home to find a burglar in his home. There was a struggle during which the burglar hit his head on the driveway and later died. No prosecution of householder who was clearly acting in self-defence (Derbyshire);
Armed robbers threatened a pub landlord and barmaid with extreme violence. The barmaid escaped, fetched her employer’s shotgun and shot at least one of the intruders. Barmaid not prosecuted (Hertfordshire);
Two burglars entered a house armed with a knife and threatened a woman. Her husband overcame one of the burglars and stabbed him. The burglar died. There was no prosecution of the householder but the remaining burglar was convicted (Lincolnshire);
A middle aged female took a baseball bat off a burglar and hit him over the head, fracturing his skull. The burglar made a complaint but the CPS refused to prosecute (Lancashire).”

OTOH an example of a prosecution: “A man laid in wait for a burglar on commercial premises, caught him, tied him up, beat him, threw him into a pit and set fire to him (Cheshire).”

Pinko liberals eh? What’s the world coming to when we can’t set fire to a defenceless man?

(* Likewise in relation to human rights Starmer said, “”I have neither agreed nor disagreed with the government or the opposition on this. My concern is with victims and witnesses and the HRA has been a very effective instrument in progressing the rights of victims and witnesses. I am anxious that there shouldn’t be any halting of that progress.”)

From personal experience, the Conservative Home blog evidently has problems accommodating any critical comment about leading Conservative politicians.

I dared to criticise some nonsense about interest rates spouted by John Redwood so my post got promptly deleted and when I ventured to suggest Cameron was superficial when he says: Society does exist but it’s not the same as the state, the discussion was abruptly terminated. All I asked was: How many societies are there in Britain and how can we tell?

Ideological pluralism is evidently regarded as a deeply heretical manifestation in Conservative circles and not one to be tolerated so I’m quite fearful about what will become of open public debate in the event of a Conservative government.

From early contributions to this thread, it really looks as though any civil servant making a critical comment about Conservative policy will need to start worring about his job prospects – so much for the civil servants’ motto: Speak truth unto power.

……….”I dared to criticise some nonsense about interest rates spouted by John Redwood so my post got promptly deleted and when I ventured to suggest Cameron was superficial when he says: Society does exist but it’s not the same as the state, the discussion was abruptly terminated. ”

FASINATING.

You see, this is all you need to know about Ian Dale and his swamp of a site. It is not very long ago that he was boasting about how non political his site was , and how many young people were coming to his site for news.

Dale is a snake oil salesman that sells bullshit. If you are to clever for him he becomes the communist tsar he claims to hate.

All here might wish to know about this immensely illuminating history, drawn from public archives, of what happened with Mrs Thatcher’s proposals for spending cuts when she became PM in 1979:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/30/margaret-thatcher-cuts-national-archive

It is perhaps worth recalling here that by the time of the election in April 1992, when John Major was PM, tax revenues as a percentage of Britain’s GDP were about the same as in May 1979 when Mrs T became PM.

By the final quarter of 1995, Britain’s standardised (ILO) unemployment rate was eventually lower than that of France, Germany or Italy and Britain’s employment rate of working-age people was higher. Coincidentally or otherwise, the Pound had dropped out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in September 1992 and the exchange rate of the Pound dropped then by about a quarter. John Major, as Chancellor in succession to Nigel Lawson since October 1989, had entered the Pound into the ERM in October 1990 to the approbation of Gordon Brown.

One conclusion we might tentatively conclude from that resume is that open and informed public debate about policy issues is more likely to illuminate and prevent government policy failures. I’m not a regular fan of Hegel but he seems to have had a valid insight when he wrote:

“What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
[Hegel: Philosophy of History]

Btw exonerate Iain Dale from what happens on the Conservative Home blog as he is not the editor of that blog.

ukliberty – you mean that the DPP actually made an intelligent comment, the Telegraph and BBc took it out of context, and now hysterical Tories are screaming the guy is a ZaNuLabour goon?

I’m shocked! I’m sure you’re having me on. Next thing you know ConservativeHome will start actually reading and examining what people have actually said.

Tim Montgomerie has been exposed as a homophobic racist, so I don’t take anything he says even remotely seriously.

Biffy Dunderdale: “Quite – you just don’t get it do you. He is not meant to be activist of any sort.”

The thing is, he will be decried as an “activist” no matter what he does. Guidance had to be published on assisted suicide. No matter what it said, it is guaranteed that it would be seen as ‘activism’ by either those in favour or against on the issue, because the law is unclear. He’s being made a scapegoat by politicians unwilling to take the flak for taking sides on the issue.

On the other recent issue: his department was being attacked by Chris Grayling and the tabloid press for heartlessly imprisoning homeowners who as much as touch a burglar. What is he meant to do, get down on his knees and grovel to apologise for something his department demonstrably doesn’t do? It’s a simple fact (try reading the law, or about a few cases) that the existing law allows householders to use reasonable force already, in theory even to kill a burglar in the heat of the moment – as Chris Grayling later conceded himself.

Civil servants may have to be politically neutral, but this doesn’t mean they are actually obliged to distort the truth to incriminate themselves when accused…

“Tim Montgomerie has been exposed as a homophobic racist, so I don’t take anything he says even remotely seriously.”

Thanks for the info. He used to be Iain Duncan Smith’s chief of staff as well, which could help to explain much.

Credit where it’s due; aside from bizarre obsessions with All Women Shortlists, Europe, Anthrogenic Global Warming and Islam, Tim’s one of the least objectionable Conservatives – especially on that site, all of my comments get through, and he proactively cuts ad hominems wherever they stem from. Now, there’s a RIGHT weirdo called Melancthon, or something, or writes there, who’s got some REALLY weird ideas. At one stage he proposed the government giving people lump sums to pay for the exhorbitant cost of weddings.

@Bob B what is it with party leaders not even in government calling their bumboys “chief of staff”? They are glorified bag-carriers, and their bosses are not US Presidents.

“Tim Montgomerie has been exposed as a homophobic racist, so I don’t take anything he says even remotely seriously.”

Why am I not in the least bit surprised by this news?

John Booth @18

Tim Montgomerie has been exposed as a homophobic racist, so I don’t take anything he says even remotely seriously.

Could you provide some detail on this please?

John Booth @ 22

“bumboys” ?

Sailing a bit close to the homophobic wind yourself here aren’t you?

Starmer should not of course insert himself into party politics but he is duty bound to explain the current law and how it operates in the light of Grayling’s rather mendacious attempts to misrepresent it. Grayling suggests that householders acting in self defence are liable to be convicted. This is not the law. If Grayling wishes to argue that householders should have an untrammeled right to kill intruders regardless of necessity, whether by way of retribution or deterrence, then he should be honest enough to say so.

Maybe that’s the answer for Diane Pretty and the pro-euthanasiasts. If you can’t get yourself to Dignitas, simply break into the house of a gun-wielding survivalist. Bish, bosh – you’re dead, they’ve protected their property – no-one gets prosecuted.

Is Mongomerie worried about LauraK (Kuennesberg) the BBC journo who, according to Sir Iain Dale is Tory MPs’ favourite journalist in the British media? Or Nick Robinson, former Young Cons National Chairman?

Or the foreign £millions his Party is using to try and buy power?

Nope.

HM Labour Government will have to toughen up in the second half of 2010.

We stand for a pluralist society certainly, but we must require a level playing field in the future.

It is worrying that the British Conservative movement is so reliant on such blatant mendacity. From ConHome, through the Taxpayers Alliance, to the raft of Tory supporting newspapers, no one sensible would trust anything emanating this alliance of rightwing zealots.

They’re getting as bad as their nutty political cousins over the water. I hope it doesn’t take British voters 8 years to wake up to this like it did for many Americans.