The Royals and BNP deserve each other
I didn’t think much in the world of politics could shock me anymore. Yet the news that the BNP are to be invited to Buckingham Palace shocks me. My republicanism has not been pronounced over the last few years because there’ve been other things to attend to.
When attending picket lines or passing out leaflets there isn’t a lot of time to be denouncing the parasitic organism that is the Royal Family. Not when there are Tories aiming to take every last penny from the working man’s pocket and the Fascists aiming to relocate half of Britain abroad just because we don’t measure up to what they consider to be British.
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Labour activists ‘disappointed’ by party leadership
Labour party candidates and activists who organised a letter to the NEC urging strong leadership on the MPs expenses said last night the Prime Minister had lost the opportunity to get back in touch with public opinion.
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Time to offer political parties a new deal – ‘reselect.org’
Both Labour and the Conservatives have moved to take away the whip – and effectively deselect – MPs that have offended public morality with their expense claims.
But is this really enough? Are we simply to be satisfied that a few examples are made of the most egregious cases of an abuse of parliamentary expenses and leave it at that? Or is there a wider crisis the the quality of representation that needs addressing?
I think that this provides us with a fantastic opportunity to renew the entire political class in the UK. It is time for us to think about how we can reinvigorate widespread participation in political parties – old and new. For this reason, I’d like to propose that we – the voters – offer the political parties a new deal. It runs like this:
“We will double the membership of the local party that we support – but only if they will let us re-select our candidate.”
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Blaming for the BNP ‘protest’ vote
Firstly, you absolutely must go here and read this from last year. It’s a wonderful piece that removes all the fluff and nonsense that surrounds the issues of why people vote for fascist scum, leaving you with one inescapable conclusion: that scum are scum and vote for scum because they’re scum.
But no. People – ironically, it’s often the exact kind of people who would be deliberately simplistic about issues like crime, claiming that kids who nick a penny chew from the pick’n'mix are ‘feral’ and so on – like to get all complicated about the reasons why people vote BNP.
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Speaker resignation is a convenient sideshow
There’s no doubt Michael Martin had to go – his attempt to blame MPs when the reputation of parliament crumbled was absurd. But it was also very convenient for the Tories to move the focus move to a detested Labour figure that could carry the can for everyone. It was less convenient for Labour because they’re fully implicated anyway. continue reading… »
The media is downplaying Greens and talking up the BNP
Recent polling since the expenses scandal broke shows the Greens have been reaping the rewards of public anger at the main Parliamentary parties. Some indicate we may even receive a result rivaling the 15% highpoint of the ’89 election.
A ComRes poll this weekend put the Tories at 28%, Labour at 20%, the Lib Dems on 14%, below UKIP’s 15%, with the Greens on 11% and the BNP on just 4%. A YouGov poll out yesterday showed that could be the tip of a more radical, positive mood: 34% said they may vote Green at this election.
But here’s the funny thing: the primary focus of the media, and the BBC in particular, has been on the BNP. It remains a party that appears to be falling short of expectations for them.
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Time for a new Chartism for the UK
by Rick Muir, of IPPR
The sight of Ming Campbell, a hitherto widely respected Lib Dem elder statesman, being heckled and jeered on Question Time, was to long-standing observers of British politics profoundly shocking. Over the weekend Tam Dalyell and Gerald Kaufman, also widely respected political veterans, had to go in front of the media to justify claims for £18,000 bookcases and antique rugs.
People are making comparisons with the Italian ‘clean hands’ scandal of the mid 1990s, which wiped out the entire party system. There are parallels with the collapse of the Venezuelan party system just over a decade ago, in which long standing party loyalties, already under strain, suddenly snapped following an economic crash and corruption scandals that implicated the whole political class from left to right. The outcomes of both of those episodes are salutary: the emergence and later political dominance of charismatic populist movements headed by Silvio Berlusconi and Hugo Chavez.
So where might the pieces settle following this unprecedented parliamentary scandal? Could the party system, one of the fixed comfortable constants of British politics, actually collapse?
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Storm Brewing
The atmosphere in Westminster is oppressive. Hop up the steps from the tube and the cries from the Tamils on Parliament Square bite your ears. I’ve seen plenty of protests on that piece of green over the past few years, but this one crackles like a storm-cloud ready to discharge a bolt of lightning.
The wind seems angry too, sweeping through Victoria Tower Gardens, pulling the hats off tourists and messing up their grey comb-overs. The pigtails on school children billow in syncronicity with the union flag above the tower.
Meanwhile, the press and the suits hurry in and out of the building. They ignore the angry mob and the red flags across the street, and yet they are under attack. They shrug off the violent wind, yet there is a storm brewing inside.
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Exclusive: Angry Labour activists sign letter on MPs expenses
A broad swathe of Labour Party activists and parliamentary candidates are tonight circulating a letter to express concern over the way party leaders have failed to take charge over the MPs expenses scandal.
The letter, addressed to the National Executive Committee chair, says they were writing to register their protest at, “the conduct of many Labour MPs, ministers and cabinet ministers in allowance and expense claims funded by hard working British taxpayers during the tenure of this Parliament”.
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Exclusive: More should be asked over Nadine Dorries’ expenses
This is by David Reeves, Labour PPC for Mid Bedfordshire
In May 2008 I referred to the Parliamentary Commissioner, Mr John Lyon, the question of whether the type and combination of expense claims made by Nadine Dorries MP (Con, Mid Beds) were within the rules (letter below).
This followed the concern of a constituent as to why Mrs Dorries claimed more in annual train and car expenses in 2006/07 (£12,005) than fellow Bedfordshire MPs Patrick Hall (£1,198) and Alistair Burt (£7,017).
In 2006/07 Mrs Dorries claimed £6,431 under section 5a car, and £5,574 under section 5c rail. The constituent was concerned that to have claimed so much for car expenses, under the rules Mrs Dorries would have needed to travel some 16,444 miles in the year, the equivalent of driving a 45 mile journey every day to all 4 corners of the large rural constituency, which would take at best 1hr 24 minutes (source: Google maps), in addition to her Westminster duties.
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A Campaign to Clean Up Westminster
While there has been a lot of anger and condemnation expressed about MPs expenses, and quite rightly too, there is less agreement about how we take this forward. The outrage over expenses is, to my mind, a proxy for wider annoyance and disenchantment with Westminster.
So the question is: can we capture use the anger and energy out there and channel it towards a wider agenda? There’s a lot of people already thinking about this and I went to one meeting yesterday where some people are planning to do exactly that.
But two questions are key. First, what should be the agenda and list of demands? How would you like to see Westminster changed? Secondly, what would be the vehicle to push through broader change?
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The Common Wealth Party
The lives of those with distinguished World War II military careers still pepper the obituary pages, but not with the frequency that they once did. I enjoyed this passage from his obituary by Roy Roebuck:
He first arrived at the Commons with his newly awarded Distinguished Flying Cross ribbon inexpertly self-sewn on to his uniform. A Conservative MP, who was a squadron leader in the RAF police, approached. “You are improperly dressed,” he told Millington.
“If you are talking to me as an RAF officer,” Millington replied, “take your hand out of your pocket and address a senior officer as ‘Sir’. If you are addressing me as a fellow MP, mind your own business and bugger off.” He did.
Millington famously won a by-election in the true-blue Tory seat of Chelmsford, standing for the short-lived Common Wealth Party. Its objectives were “common ownership, democracy, and morality in politics.” Perhaps it should re-form in time for the Euro elections next month!?
(x-pstd)
Introducing Magna Carta 2.0 – our way forward
You want to know where we go from here? We need a new Magna Carta. Sunny recently said he wanted “an insurgency to take our rights back from the state”. This now includes our right to honest government, though I think we always knew that. The emphasis needs to be on achieving this.
In February the Convention on Modern Liberty in London and across the UK showed a clear public concern with the threat of authoritarian power and a hunger to debate and confront it in an intelligent and democratic way. Guy Aitchison, Clare Coatman and Tom Ash are, from today, launching Magna Carta 2.0 with the aim of taking the spirit and intelligence of the day to the country.
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The New Benefit Thieves
Will Rhodes sent this in, which just needed publishing.
And something else: Conservatives are always crowing on about the importance of MPs having private sector experience so they’d understand the value of cutting costs and of efficiency. What a pile of bullshit that theory now turned out to be hey? They turned out to be just as big scammers of the system as Labour MPs.
Whatever happened to all the private sector experience regarding efficiency and value for money for the taxpayers? Not so evident now is it? (h/t sally)
The Broken Party?
A shadow cabinet full of scammers
Expense claims from the shadow cabinet
• Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary and a member of Cameron’s inner circle, spent more than £7,000 furnishing a London property in 2006 before “flipping” the second home designation to a new one in his Surrey Heath constituency.
• Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, spent thousands of pounds renovating a thatched Tudor country cottage before selling it. He then moved the second designation to a London flat.
• Alan Duncan, the shadow leader of the Commons who chairs the Commons audit committee which oversees MPs’ expenses, had a claim for £3,194 gardening expenses declined in March 2007. He says this hapened after he raised the matter with the Commons authorities.
• Francis Maude, the shadow cabinet office minister who is leading the Tories’ preparations for government, tried to claim mortgage interest on his family home in Sussex. This was declined by the Commons fees office.
• Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary and another member of the Cameron circle, claimed for the renovation of a London flat which is 17 miles from his family home.
• Cheryl Gillan, the shadow Welsh secretary, claimed for dog food. She has agreed to repay the claim.
• Oliver Letwin, who is in charge of the Tories’ general election manifesto, charged £2,000 to replace a leaking pipe under a tennis court. The pipe was not related to the court and Letwin was obliged to mend the pipe after an order from the local water authority.
• David Willetts, the shadow universities secretary, claimed more than £100 for workmen to replace 25 lightbulbs at his home.
How can we trust police intent now?
“Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards. Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon,” reports the Guardian today.
I really hoped that the assault on Ian Tomlinson had been an accident. It wasn’t. I really hoped that the police medics had not been engaged in violent assaults: they had. I really hoped that the police medical teams had been provided to care for the injured; in fact protesters were explicitly refused help, by medics, while bleeding. I really hoped that the police had not been targeting legal observers and arresting them, harassing them, stealing their recording equipment, defacing their notebooks. All of these things were happening.
But now there is much more.
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Labour plummets; polls says publish all expenses
91% of the public have backed a call for the full uncensored MPs expenses to be published, in a poll published by the News of the World today. 89% said the reputation of Parliament was being tarnished.
More worryingly for Labour, the Mail on Sunday reports a poll today showing Gordon Brown had become Labour’s most unpopular leader ever.
It reported:
If the poll’s findings were repeated in a General Election, Tory leader David Cameron would have a majority of 220 seats, beating Tony Blair’s majority of 179 after his landslide victory in 1997. The Tories would gain 237 seats, of which 200 would come from Labour. The figures make particularly bleak reading for Gordon Brown: even with Michael Foot as its leader, Labour support did not fall below 23.5 per cent.
First Tory caught duping taxpayers
Greg Barker has became the first Tory MP shamed in the expenses scandal, using the controversial second homes allowance for personal gain.
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Guilty, until proven guilty
Post by: Denny
In December last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the current legal framework for the UK DNA database was a violation of fundamental rights. The judges said they had been “struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the government’s powers to take and keep DNA samples from anyone arrested (including those who are subsequently released without charge, or found not guilty in court).
This ruling does not seem to have concerned our government a great deal.
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