Burglars, human rights and David Cameron being a vote-hungry tool

I’m getting a bit rubbish aren’t I? I’ll start posting properly again soon. Promise.

Anyroad – David ‘I’m Dave Cameron’ Cameron has said that burglars “leave human rights outside” when they break into a property.

A pretty bold statement, I think you’d agree. It’s also wrong, I believe, but that’s a lengthy discussion for another time.

The fact that it is such a lengthy, debatable issue makes it all the more sad that it is being used as a political football. I can understand, for instance, why Munir Hussain set after an intruder who attacked him and his family, tying them up. I can also understand however, why the Court saw fit to jail Mr Hussain after he chased him down a street, attacked him with a cricket bat and left him with permanent brain damage. It is a delicate issue, one with no clear answers, and one which undoubtedly will be debated through the years to come.

Which is why it is so annoying to hear Cameron come out with these three statements in the same interview:

The reason for changing the law is people I think do find it rather unclear what the current framework of reasonable force actually means.

Fair enough…

The moment a burglar steps over your threshold, and invades your property, with all the threat that gives to you, your family and your livelihood, I think they leave their human rights outside

Well, at least that’s clear what you think…

Mr Cameron said that, under the Conservative proposals, householders would only face prosecution if they used “grossly disproportionate” force against a burglar.

Oh.

If burglars have no human rights when intruding on someone elses property, then force of any proportion would seem acceptable. Yet by saying householders can face prosecution in extreme circumstances is almost like adding a safety net to a soundbite, as well as being grossly contradictory. “THIS MAN HAS NO HUMAN RIGHTS…except when you hit him a bit too hard.” Either one or the other, Dave. I don’t mind which, as you surely must have an opinion, just stop trying to please everyone in the run up to an election.

As I’ve said, this is a tough and emotional subject to cover, and I’ve not attempted to cover all of it.. I just tried to say that I hate the idea of Cameron trying to satisfy all with contradictory statements, advocating a policy he will find impossible to carry out. In trying to please everyone, he’ll end up just pleasing no one.

Right, where have I been?

Hello.

After a summer away from the ol’ blogosphere, I’m back. Mainly due to an interesting conversation I had at the Guardian Student Media Conference today, but it isn’t important.

Regular updates soon.

Oh, and watch this

New Order – The Speaker is nudged out

So, for the first time in over 300 years, the Speaker of The House of Commons has been forced out of his chair.

Oi, Hoey! You slaaaaaaaaaaaaaag!

Will tears be shed? I doubt it. At the best of times, Martin was competent and showed himself to be a passionate man (his warm welcome of to the late Patsy Calton after she regained her seat in 2005 sticks in the mind). Yet he ruffled more feathers than a non-partisan representative should.

It was an uneasy relationship from the start. From the get-go, Martin broke from tradition. A former Clydeside sheet-metal worker, he was the first Roman-Catholic Speaker since the Reformation, and did away with traditional trousers and buckled shoes in favour of his own. Opposition backbenchers were disgruntled at the length of time he gave them to speak in debates, but this is hardly groundbreaking stuff.

The Damian Green affair was the tipping point. Allowing police to arrest an MP was seen badly in the House. As the current expenses row heated up, signs of his fraying temper came to the fore, with slap-downs from the chair to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker. His focus on fixing the leak rather than addressing the expenses issue saw him percieved as someone against reform. As the signatures on the motion of no-confidence piled up, his position became untenable.

Now, enough of this political obituary nonsense, let’s get stuck in.

It’s quite easy to see the resignation of the Speaker as some kind of blood offering from the MPs to the baying public. Hopi Sen makes his point:

“It does strike me as very obvious that Michael Martin has become a convenient scapegoat for others sins, alongside his own…

…In adopting a delay and deflect strategy on expenses and allowances, Martin reflected the frequently stated will of the house. While MPs of all parties may wish to hang him out to dry now, they sheltered under his decisions for a long time…

…While Martin has not covered himself in glory, neither do the MPs who only now emerge to cast ordure at him. As a burnt offering, his deposition would only appease public anger for a little while.”

Well quite, and to an extent I do agree with him. Effectively, MPs have been waiting to see who will err first in this scandal. Martin blinked, and the attack dogs pounced on him, hoping this would satisfy the people. As Hopi says, Martin has/had flaws, but taking the flak for 645 other MPs is a bit much. It is slightly reminiscent of Gordon Brown’s comments recently over the Damien McBride scandal:

I have already taken responsibility for acting on this – first by accepting Mr McBride’s resignation and by making it clear to all concerned that such actions have no part to play in the public life of our country.

Taking responsibility doesn’t equate to letting someone else take the bullet in this case, and it still doesn’t with regards to the Commons and the Speaker.

However, he was correct to go.

Let it not be lost in translation that the Speaker is somehow separate from the people he oversees in the House. Although he has no party alligment, he is still an MP. On top of his Members’ salary of £63,291, he is also entitled to a salary of £78,575. This is on equal footing to a Cabinet Minister and Government Chief Whip, and second only to income of the Prime Minister.

A look at his expenses also shows questionable things. The Speaker has a residence situated in the grounds of the Palace of Westminster, literally next door to the House of Commons. It has been reported he used air miles gained on business trips to fund private breaks, taxis for shopping trips – even go and watch the football at Celtic Park. He has claimed over £87,500 on the second home allowance since 2001/02, which considering his proximity to the House anyway seems a bit untoward. But to make him go on these grounds would be a pot, kettle, black situation.

The main reason is his stubborness and actions. He has resisted change and parliamentary openness for some time, even trying to block details of MPs’ £5m-a-year travel expenses being published under the Freedom of Information Act. In the latest expenses scandal, he has shown resistance to change and a desire to confront those who suggest so (see Kate Hoey). He is also, lest we forget, the chief officer of the House of Commons, meaning he is responsible for the Fees’ Office’s actions as well. Unlike Brown, he can say he knows what responsibilty is.

In the end, I do think the Speaker should have gone for this, but it isn’t an ending that satisfies me entirely. It is similar to chopping the head off of a weed – if you only get rid of what is visible, the deeper workings of it still flourish and will regrow. Uprooting Parliament via a General Election may work, but hoping a new crop of MPs won’t contain one self-servant is naive at best. Make no mistake, it will take years for Parliament to recover its pride after this. Reform, election, reform…it will take a lot of this before the public will be able to trust its oarliamentarians again.

Speaker to step down at 2.30pm today

As reported by Paul Waugh, STV and now the BBC. The latest update from Waugh on his Twitter suggests that the Speaker will be gone before the summer recess.

Bloody times in the Commons. I will have a full look at this later today or this week.

FAO: MPs who respond to the flak about expenses by saying it was in the rules

Shut up.

But it was in the rules. It isn’t the fault of MPs it is the fault of the system.

Again, shut up.

But how can it be my fault if I was allowed to claim £xxxx on this?

Jesus wept, do you need this explaining to you?

Go on then…

Gladly.

I have no problem with MPs claiming expenses, at all. I don’t think many people would begrudge MPs who live far away some way of claiming expenses when on business in Westminster. That I can understand.

So why are you claiming on moat upkeep, kit kat chunkies and mortgages that don’t exist?

Because the system lets us do tha….

The system? Oh f*ck off will you? You damn well know that some of the claims are not directly helping your parliamentary business, which is what the allowance system should do. The system doesn’t claim on your behalf, it is YOU that do the claiming, sign the forms etc.

Yes, the system stinks. The only thing smelling any worse at the minute is the fact that you are milking that inanimate system, then have the cheek to deflect all blame to it.

I must say, it is quite surreal watching you all make frivilous apologies. It is akin to watching someone who has been taking a few quid from the supermarket till he works on every week get busted. It might feel a bit uncomfortable at first, but after a while it becomes second nature. ‘Need twenty quid for some shopping, I’ll get it out of here, balance the tills. It isn’t much, no one will notice, no one needs to know.’.

Eventually, the situation snowballs until your manager confronts you about it, saying they’re down on profit. Saying the current economic situation means they will have to cut hours. Saying that they have found out you have taken thousands of pounds from them over a few months/years. Saying that they think it might be best if you payback and/or go.

And then the realisation happens. The realisation that, what you have been doing is not down to the system of having access to ready cash, but down to you taking the money offered when it wasn’t yours by right. An overwhelming sense of regret, guilt and shame overcomes you, and you look back on what you did trying to hold back the tears. You say you’re sorry over and over, and by all accounts you probably mean it – I mean, you’re not a terrible person. You work hard enough, do your job well and seem a decent bloke. But how can I ever trust you again with the money? In your case, the taxpayers money? I just can’t.

I’m afraid, we’ll have to let you go.

But what if the system changes?

Oh just go away will you?

How much did it cost Parliament to answer questions in 2007-08?

Answer = £12,253,115

F*cking hell. I hope they were thorough answers.

Number of questions is available in the sessional returns. Cost of questions is in a House of Commons Information Office Factsheet.

I have info about the costs for this year but I believe I am not at liberty to publish it…oh well.

Expenses, blogs and the real agenda setters

I’ve not posted for about two weeks now, and yet still the first thing I see in the news today is the stories of the expenses of Members of Parliament.

After the Telegraph got hold of the data, rumoured to have cost them £150,000, they have released snippets of it into the public domain.

Cabinet Ministers felt the force first, with Hazel Blears at the head. The revelation that she claimed allowances on three separate properties in the space of a year has made her position, to some, untenable. In response, Hazel Blears has denied breaking any rules whilst dressed like an extra from Easy Rider.

Sinn Fein MPs got their cages rattled on Saturday. The party’s five representatives in Parliament don’t actually, er, represent their constituencies in Parliament. In fact, they don’t actually sit in Parliament in protest. Yet they still managed to procure over £105,000 in second home expenses. Before we go overboard here, it is worth noting that due to their absenteeism they do not get paid a salary. Fair enough – but what business would they have in London then that requires a second home? I would like to know, because to reject with one hand and take with the other seems a bit hypocritical. It is quite the dagger in Sinn Fein’s legitimacy.

Over the course of the last two days, the Conservatives have also had their dirty laundry aired out in the pages of the Telegraph. Changing lightbulbs, dog food, gardening…all the necessaries for parliamentary duty.

Now I apologise as I’ve got a tendency to go all Charlie Brooker here, but anywho…

On the face of it, the whole exposé seems like an excellent piece of journalism, blowing open the bubble around Westminster, and opening the frivolous consumption of taxpayer sterling by honourable Members (LOL) to public scrutiny. For too long our constituency representatives have got away with this, and now we can bring this sorry mess to an end. A modern day Watergate.

Except you’d be wrong.

The Telegraph have been quick to lap-up the praise in the wake of them ‘breaking’ the story – taking plaudits from the Observer, a former Guardian editor and Alistair Campbell. Bless em.

Yet if having a spare £150k to blow on some scans (see top of page) is what is classed as investigative these days then god help us all. In fact, it shows the lengths to which papers are willing to go in order to set the news agenda. Why is this?

Well a long, long time ago, before the Internet, Government and the media were rather intertwined (as Peter Oborne reminds us). One wanted power, the other wanted good circulation figures. As the best-selling stories uniformally relate to scandal, this meant tacit agreements were in place which scripted the whats, whens and hows of a story and the Government’s reaction. Soap opera-ish.

Then the Internet came, and instead of reading about stories in the paper, people set up blogs and blew a gasket about them. Recessmonkey, Guido, everyone else with a voice and a keyboard decided they had something to say, and nobody could stop them. The whole thing has got to the stage now where we have bloggers appearing on TV, and in the case of the recent Mcbride scandal, directly effecting politics.

Guido made a £10,000 offer last month to the receipts-holder, who had approached The Times for the sum of £300k. Since then the Telegraph has had to stump up an astronomical sum of money to be able to become the agenda setter…for the time being. From a media perspective, it just shows that with the introduction of free-for-all internet blogging, the cost of setting the agenda for newspapers has, ironically, gone up and up.

Brown says sorry…er, no.

It’s been reported in the papers and various other news outlets today that Gordon Brown has apologised for the Smeargate affair.

Don't forget to leave the keys behind when you're down, Gordon.

So, let’s have a look at what he said then in his apology.

Making a fresh attempt to close down the row, Mr Brown said: “I take full responsibility for what happened. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately.

Sorry, Gordon?

Making a fresh attempt to close down the row, Mr Brown said: “I take full responsibility for what happened. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately.

Are you kidding me? THAT’S an apology? Saying you take full responsibility in one breath, and in the next putting the responsibility on someone else is not saying sorry, nor is it taking responsibilty.

In fact, it is pretty much a rehash of the third paragraph in the letter you wrote to the affected parties. Repeating it via your mouth does not make it an apology.

Some people are just too proud for their own good, because make no mistake, this is getting terminal for GB and the Labour Party if they want any chance of getting a fourth successive term in Government.

Political slander – it just got personal

Hello. Sorry for a lack of updates – a rather topsy turvy week or so has contributed to this – and I am no doubt late to the blog party when opening on this subject. But hey, I might as well throw in my tuppence worth.

For those of you who do not know, which will no doubt total nobody, the PM’s advisor, Damien Mcbride (above), has been forced to resign after it emerged that he discussed smearing senior Conservatives. What seems to have got the goat of most people is the fact that some of the smears weren’t aimed at the MPs themselves, but family members. Politicians who enter the Commons must accept that from time to time they will receive flak, true or not, but when people try and target people outside the political game then that just isn’t cricket.

It reminds of that great scene in the first season of The Wire, where detectives Moreland and McNulty bring in D’Angelo Barksdale for an interview. The subject is the murder of William Gant, who was murdered not for what he did, or what he stood for, but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The message from it was clear – if you take a hit within the game, that’s to be expected. But when you ace a working man, a civilian…

Anyway, back to politics. One of the emails suggested questioning the mental state of George Osborne’s wife, for example, and Tory MPs and political reporters a like have expressed their disgust at the actions which the Labour party looked to go ahead with. If the idea of political spin had a low opinion before, it has just crashed through into the basement, faceplanting the cold, concrete floor.

Whether Guido’s inclination to release the information was more motivated by the idea of getting one over rival blogger Derek Draper or to uncover the murky waters in Whitehall is debatable (I’d argue it is a case of getting two birds with one stone), but the damage it has done cannot be underestimated. The only people who seem to underestimate it are, bizarrely, the Labour hierarchy. It has been four days since the story broke, and yet there has been no public apology by the Prime Minister. Sure, letters have been written, but he hasn’t actually apologised for anything. For the record, I love this quote from the above letter:

I have already taken responsibility for acting on this – first by accepting Mr McBride’s resignation and by making it clear to all concerned that such actions have no part to play in the public life of our country.

Haha. If the definition of responsibility in your eyes is letting someone take the heat in front of you and denying any wrongdoing, then you need a new dictionary sunshine. Rightly, Brown has been panned for the oversight of not personally apologising. Stubborn as a mule that lad. Not that it didn’t go unnoticed – Private Eye magazine awarded it the “Stalinist quote of the week” accolade.

In the interest of balance, I’d like to finish off with a quote from Paddy Ashdown’s memoirs, published in the Sunday Times this weekend. He talks about the aftermath of when news of his affair with his secretary came to light:

All this made life for my family even more difficult and seriously undermined my self-confidence, too. That, it appears, was precisely what was supposed to happen – as we discovered after the election, when we learnt that some Tories had imported a group of US activists called “the Nerds”, whose job was to spread malign rumours and make unfounded personal accusations against senior opposition MPs.

Perhaps this was done without official sanction from the top of the Conservative party. But after the election Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of The Sun, revealed that at least one cabinet-level Tory minister had approached him seeking to retail scurrilous and untrue allegations against a number of senior opposition MPs.

With David Cameron saying Labour have been in charge for too long, one would say almost addicted on the fumes of executive power, it is worth noting that this ill seems to fall to anyone who gets too familiar with the corridors of 10 Downing Street in the modern era.

EDIT: Check out this blog for a couple of snippets from the emails. Oh lol.

Protests, Capitalism and The Need for a Moral Compass

Unless you happen to be in the middle of a particularly remote vacuum, you would have noticed that today marks the beginning of the G20 summit of world leaders in London.

Looking along Whitehall today, you wouldn’t have noticed a difference apart from a few extra police and some metal barriers. Yet a few miles down the river in the Square Mile, protests are being staged. One branch of RBS has been completely goosed by the protesters (or rioters in this case), and the media report up to 23 arrests have been made, though this figure may change.

What are they protesting about? Although certain groups of protestors have grabbed the headlines, such as the G20 Meltdown group and their demand for the abolishment of capitalism, there are many other groups involved as well, with varying wishes.

There do however seem to be three main desires. The first is the reconstruction of the financial sector, driven by the need of relative equity and not the desire of individual greed. The second is tackling climate change, a phenomenon creeping upon us slowly but surely, which many people believe must be stop before the problem becomes too severe to deal with. For some, like the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, the creation of ‘green’ jobs will go some way to helping the achievement of both of these targets. The third, as goes with most protests these days, is wanting troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this post, however, I wish to focus on the first of the targets; the restructing of financial markets, or for some, the destruction of capitalism. Capitalism by definition, has four qualities:
- commodities have ‘market value’ rather than ‘use value’. Hence water is alot cheaper than diamond, despite the former being a lot more useful in keeping us, er, alive.
- productive wealth is predominantly held in private hands
- economic life is organised by demand (what consumers are willing and able to consume) and supply (what producers are willing and able to produce).
- the main motiviation for enterprise and hard work is self interest and profit maximisation.

Although arguments can be made againsts all four of these tenets, I’m going to guess that most people will be in the street protesting in particular against the fourth point. It is, after all, the ‘enterprise’ of risk-taking by banks (and indeed Governments) in the boom years, driven by the desire to maximise profits, which has come to bite them so hard on the arse of late. The risks taken have and are being handsomely rewarded in the private sector, with six-figure salaries backed with similar bonuses an indicator that it is in the interest of the money-driven individual working in the private sector to take such risks. It is this culture which has contributed to the loss of countless numbers of jobs worldwide, not to mention problems with mortgages, currency devaluation and the like. It has also taken away focus from projects to battle poverty, develop renewable energy and stop climate change – the problem is of such magnitude that it comes before everything else.

So, you can see why some people might be angry at both Government and the finance sector, seeing as the proposed solution to this problem seems to be governments throwing capital at the people who misused and abused the capital in the first place. Capitalist society simply cannot survive without the existence of these trading insitutions, which are imperative to a market-orientated system. More pertinently, the bail-out actions of governments suggest they cannot survive without Capitalism.

It would be easy to critique the idealism and anarchism shown by protesters today by saying they facilitate the system themselves by owning a bank account. That would be missing the point however. In the main, people put money in bank accounts to keep it safe. It is the conduct of the speculative banks which is the problem, risking money which essentially is not theirs. This is all well and good when the risk pays off, but when it doesn’t…well, you can see the results for yourself.
The main flaw of Capitalism stems from the application of theory into practice. The free market is the most efficient and productive system of economics, they say, and in theory they would be right. Open any basic textbook and it will tell you as such. Yet is there a genuine ‘free market’? In a word, no. The lack of any regulation leads it open to abuse. As the primary actors in the system are driven by profit maximisation and self interest, they therefore do not take into account the effect of their actions on a wider level. Their actions, leading to the crisis, led to almost 4,607 businesses going into insolvency in the last three months of 2008, a rise of 51.6% on the corresponding period in 2007. Yet as the not-so-big players go, the big players retain their position, albeit a little winded. Yet they now face less competition than before and thus become more monopolistic, able to charge higher than before as they face less competition.

Hypocrisy can also be seen on the blogosphere. Most notably, Guido Fawkes posted his support of Capitalism and the “greed is good” philosophy. I’ve no problem with a man standing up for his views, whether I disagree or not. Yet days earlier he was lambasting the greed of MPs in the expenses scandal. Now before people hit back with “…but MPs are claiming at the expense of the taxpayer!”, it is worth remembering that £37billion of taxpayers money was invested in RBS, Lloyds TSB and HBOS in October alone. By contrast, the amount of taxpayers money spent on Members of Parliament was 159.3million in the year 2007/08. It seems daft to support the greed of a part-nationalised banking sector straight after damning the greed of the public sector.

It is time for a moral compass to enter decision making in the private sector. A sector, the main properties of which profess self-interest and greed, may be good at producing but it is not designed with the consumer in mind. The capitalist doesn’t even have other producers in mind – self interest also means, as the statistics show, other producers who aren’t up to speed are swept away in a flash. Do we live in such an unforgiving society that the interests of the few are catered for, but to the detriment of many?

Regulating the capitalist’s behaviour could be the first small step to changing this.