If you pay close attention this afternoon, you might just spot something that hasn't been seen for close to 400 years; Mr Speaker, Michael Martin, being expelled from the House of Commons.
When he does, eventually and reluctantly, take his leave, his going will, no doubt, be marked by sober and heartfelt tributes to his worthiness, personal probity and dedication to Parliament and democracy.
As usual, the hypocricy and crocodile tears will serve only to highlight the Old Boy's club mentality of most MPs - even those of the female persuasion. Some of the names already thrown into the ring for consideration as his successor, doubtless by impartial friends and associates of the nominees, feature entrenched opponents of democratic government like Harriet Harman and serial expense fiddlers such as Ming Campbell. Who says that virtue has its own reward?
Anyway, back to Speaker Martin. Rarely can anyone have been less suited to a job. Martin was not merely ignorant of Parliament, its function or traditions ; he actually tried to make a virtue of his ignorance: As if being a product of the Gorbals, the trades union movement and Old Labour not only excused his ignorance but precluded him from acquiring any of the knowledge or understanding necessary to the role of Speaker of the House of Commons. The fact that George Thomas - Viscount Tonypandy - rose from an even more humble background to become universally acknowledged as one of the great modern Speakers was just one aspect of the history of his role that he, patently, failed to grasp.
Some old Labour apparatchiks wear their working class credentials like a shield. Martin used his as a bludgeon. Opposed by anyone capable of forming a coherent sentence, his instinctive reaction was to accuse them of snobbery. In this, he was enthusiastically aided and abbetted by other members of the Lowlands tartan mafia.
As soon as news of his imminent resignation leaked out, these Labour outriders were busying themselves on the political blogs on the Guardian and Independent websites. Their snide little posts stand out like dog turds on a snow-covered field. Predictably, they claim that Martin is a Skapegoat (sic) hunted down by a mob of howling cretins. Whether this refers to the Press or the public is not altogether clear.
The fact that he - along with Harriet Harman and one Gordon Brown - spent £2 million to try to prevent the expenses information being published is, apparently, neither here nor there. Poor old Michael is characterised as yet another good socialist crushed under the wheels of the right wing juggernaut.
Mind you, if Not So Flash Gordon and his friends start to use Martin's demise as an opportunity to draw one of their famous lines under events and "move on", then we all might just start to think of him as a convenient scapegoat. For, let none of us forget that the great Gordon has plenty to answer for on the expenses front; not the least why he needed to maintain a London home as well as a constituency home while living for 12 years in his grace and favour pad in Downing Street.
Now that Martin has had to fly from the House (couldn't resist that one) he might just feel inclined to reveal where some of Gordon's other bodies are buried. In which case, look out for an early promotion to the House of Lords and further and better opportunities for the lad from Glasgow East to feather his nest at the public's expense.
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Shining examples
“I know this isn’t enough and people are angry and it will take time. My single most important thing in my life is my relationship with my constituents in Salford.” Of course it is, Miss Blears: especially when they are likely to take the first available opportunity to end the relationship; probably about this time next year when Gordon finally calls an election.
Suddenly, if the stream of contrite apologies spewing out of Westminster is anything to go by, the penny has, finally, dropped. MPs of all parties now seem to understand that the British electorate is absolutely appalled at the whole expenses scam. They will no longer be fobbed off with references to rules and entitlements. They will no longer shrug at the idea that someone living in a relative's bedroom actually, honestly, believes it to be her main residence. Tory grandees who use the system to pay gardeners and other domestic staff will now attract odium instead of indifference.
And, despite the best efforts of his sister-in-law, Gordon Brown is still going to find it difficult to explain not why he paid someone to clean his London flat, but why he needed a London flat as a second home at all when he has spent the last 12 years lording it up in Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street at the taxpayer's expense.
The other Mrs Brown was just one of a number of extras wheeled out over the weekend to try to lighten the atmosphere surrounding the expenses scandal. Another was ex-MP Matthew Parrish whose brief was to introduce a little levity into the proceedings. This he tried - and failed - to do by making the whole thing sound like a, slightly farcical, storm in a tea-cup, with frequent references to claims for bath plugs and other inconsequential household items ; as if ramping the system to defraud taxpayers of thousands of pounds was no different to padding a claim for car mileage in the private sector. Compounding his obvious ignorance of how the private sector works, Mr Parrish then compared the relatively low pay - his words - that MPs had to endure with the fantastic salaries they would undoubtedly attract if they worked in the Private Sector; as if the City and the private sector were two interchangeable terms.
MPs earn a basic salary of £68,000 without allowances. Compared with the six and seven figure earnings of the average Investment banker, that doesn't sound like a great deal of very much at all. But, it is three times the average wage. And, take it from me, it is a great deal more than many middle managers in the productive sector of the economy enjoy. More to the point, very few of the mediocrities who populate Westminster would actually hold down a job in private industry. That is why they are all so keen to climb the political greasy pole. Because the contacts and experience they accrue during their time in power are about the only marketable attributes they have once they get tossed out of office.
The reason that this and other attempts to downplay the scandal failed was that the Telegraph released details of Tory piggery to set beside the earlier revelations of Labour snouts in the trough. At a stroke, strident Labour claims of political bias were shown to be groundless. More to the point, the latest revelations demonstrated the depth of the corruption inside our political system. It became obvious to every one but Speaker Martin -apparently- that no one was going be able to puncture this particular balloon.
If anything, the more strident the denials become, the more hot air is spouted, the larger the balloon grows. Personally, I believe that at least one major politician might receive a visit from the police in the not too distant future. My nomination is Jacqui Smith although I would be equally happy to see Darling, Michael Gove or Michael Ancram having their collar felt. We live in interesting times.
Suddenly, if the stream of contrite apologies spewing out of Westminster is anything to go by, the penny has, finally, dropped. MPs of all parties now seem to understand that the British electorate is absolutely appalled at the whole expenses scam. They will no longer be fobbed off with references to rules and entitlements. They will no longer shrug at the idea that someone living in a relative's bedroom actually, honestly, believes it to be her main residence. Tory grandees who use the system to pay gardeners and other domestic staff will now attract odium instead of indifference.
And, despite the best efforts of his sister-in-law, Gordon Brown is still going to find it difficult to explain not why he paid someone to clean his London flat, but why he needed a London flat as a second home at all when he has spent the last 12 years lording it up in Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street at the taxpayer's expense.
The other Mrs Brown was just one of a number of extras wheeled out over the weekend to try to lighten the atmosphere surrounding the expenses scandal. Another was ex-MP Matthew Parrish whose brief was to introduce a little levity into the proceedings. This he tried - and failed - to do by making the whole thing sound like a, slightly farcical, storm in a tea-cup, with frequent references to claims for bath plugs and other inconsequential household items ; as if ramping the system to defraud taxpayers of thousands of pounds was no different to padding a claim for car mileage in the private sector. Compounding his obvious ignorance of how the private sector works, Mr Parrish then compared the relatively low pay - his words - that MPs had to endure with the fantastic salaries they would undoubtedly attract if they worked in the Private Sector; as if the City and the private sector were two interchangeable terms.
MPs earn a basic salary of £68,000 without allowances. Compared with the six and seven figure earnings of the average Investment banker, that doesn't sound like a great deal of very much at all. But, it is three times the average wage. And, take it from me, it is a great deal more than many middle managers in the productive sector of the economy enjoy. More to the point, very few of the mediocrities who populate Westminster would actually hold down a job in private industry. That is why they are all so keen to climb the political greasy pole. Because the contacts and experience they accrue during their time in power are about the only marketable attributes they have once they get tossed out of office.
The reason that this and other attempts to downplay the scandal failed was that the Telegraph released details of Tory piggery to set beside the earlier revelations of Labour snouts in the trough. At a stroke, strident Labour claims of political bias were shown to be groundless. More to the point, the latest revelations demonstrated the depth of the corruption inside our political system. It became obvious to every one but Speaker Martin -apparently- that no one was going be able to puncture this particular balloon.
If anything, the more strident the denials become, the more hot air is spouted, the larger the balloon grows. Personally, I believe that at least one major politician might receive a visit from the police in the not too distant future. My nomination is Jacqui Smith although I would be equally happy to see Darling, Michael Gove or Michael Ancram having their collar felt. We live in interesting times.
Monday, 4 May 2009
What a bloody liberty!
It's akin to Ken Livingstone embracing capitalism; Jamie Oliver Oliver endorsing Turkey Twizzlers; or any member of the Christian Right in America throwing in his lot with Obama.
Today the greatest enemy of personal liberty and freedom this country has had to endure since Oilver Cromwell has had the brazen, long-necked cheek to write a hymn to Britishness.
Gordon ( I'm in charge) Brown - for it is he - has once again set out to prove either that he is a charlatan; or that he is completely bonkers; or, possibly, a large dollop of both. Writing in today's Daily Mail, the man who has either directly encouraged or, at the very least, has failed to prevent, the enactment of the most restrictive Laws in recent British history has had the nerve to list the love of personal liberty as one of the defining British traits.
This, let us remind ourselves, is a man who has been at the very heart of the Labour administration for 13 years; the man, let us not forget, who was desperate for us to appreciate just how much power and influence he wielded when he was Chancellor. Nothing, apparently, got done or even considered until Gordon Brown had evaluated it, approved it and, most importantly since he held the purse strings in his great clunking fist, agreed to stump up the readies to fund it.
Thus, we can be sure that he endorsed, and still endorses, legislation that will require every freedom loving British citizen to carry an ID Card; that forces the same sons and daughters of liberty to present a passport or other photo I.D even when travelling internally by plane in the UK, that threatens them with arrest or the confiscation of their camera if they take photographs that the police might object to ( such as coppers battering demonstrators or shooting innocent Brazilian electricians) ; that treats mildly eccentric trainspotters as potential terrorists; that instructs the police to arrest innocent Christians for expressing sincerely-held, but negative, opinions about homosexuality; that removes their right (or liberty) to express beliefs, however soberly held, about other faith or belief systems; that seeks to convince us that the only way for the government to protect our hard-won liberties is to allow them at both national and local level to spy on our e-mails, on-line searches and other electronic communications; that uses Parliamentary democracy to turn one significant group of people in our society - smokers -into pariahs and sub-humans who are not allowed to enjoy the same social interaction as the rest of us in pubs, bars and restaurants.
All of these things are Gordon's legacy to us; the sum of 13 years of his management of the country. He has helped to create a police state whose intrusion and control of people's lives goes way beyond anything that George Orwell ever envisaged in 1984. With the willing assistance of the brain-dead ( Jacqui Smith), the infantile ( Harman, Milliband, Balls) and the manipulative in the shape of Mandelson, Blair and Campbell, he has attacked and all but destroyed the very British characteristics - tolerance, fair play, justice and Liberty- that he claims are so central to his being in today's Daily Mail.
And, with the hugely divisive and class-based equality legislation that Lady Longford ( AKA Harriet Harman) is introducing, the last bastions of personal liberty - including the freedom to choose work mates, business colleagues, councillors and other officials soley on their qualifications and ability to do a particular job - will be consigned to the dustbin along with freedom of speech and expression.
Brown promised an end to boom and bust. What we ended up with is the biggest bust in British hsitory. Brown, typically, says none of it is his fault. It's a global problem.
Now, he wants the British people to buy into his new-found sense of Britishness, while doing everything in his power to destroy it. When people finally wake up to what is happening; when it becomes clear that the people principally affected by anti-terorist legislation are not foreign insurgents but their own friends, family and neighbours, Brown will place the blame on everything - and everyone- but himself.
He has already seeded the ground in his Mail article, referring to " security threats that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago."
Let's see. Fifty years takes us back to 1959. True the UK didn't face the threat of Moslem terrorism that it does now. But, that's not to say that there were no threats. In no particular order, I can think of Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists, the Mau Mau in Kenya; insurgents in Malaysia and Aden. Later, from 1969 onwards, we saw the rise of the IRA, the Provisional IRA and other splinter groups all of whom regularly inflicted , or tried to inflict, terror on the British people. I am old enough to remember the bomb attacks on the Horse Guards, the Old Bailey, the Tory's Brighton hotel and the Guildford squaddies' pub; all of which were carried out by men who looked, talked and, more or less, shared the same cultural background as the bulk of the population. In that sense, they represented a much more difficult threat to counter than that posed by Moslem extremists who come from a large, but clearly dentifiable minority, of the population.
None of the measures introduced to curb the IRA campaigns - which I objected to along with many other people - were so loosely drafted as to enable local councils and other organisations to use them against innocent members of the general public. Now, we are cursed with an administration that is apparently incapable of drafting legislation of equivalent unambivalence. Instead, modern terrorism laws are so open to mis-interpretation that they have been used to spy on parents accused of placing their kids in the wrong schools, and to eject an octogenarian acivist - who had the temerity to embarass Jack Straw - from the Labour Conference.
Some might say this bad draftsmanship is inadvertent or simple incompetence. I beg to differ. This is an administration stuffed to the gills with lawyers. If the legislation allows them and their appointees to harass, observe and control the population at large then I believe it to be by design, not accident.
Whatever Gordon might write, now or in the future, about his love of liberty, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. He is an enemy of freedom and personal liberty and a real threat to democracy in this country.
Today the greatest enemy of personal liberty and freedom this country has had to endure since Oilver Cromwell has had the brazen, long-necked cheek to write a hymn to Britishness.
Gordon ( I'm in charge) Brown - for it is he - has once again set out to prove either that he is a charlatan; or that he is completely bonkers; or, possibly, a large dollop of both. Writing in today's Daily Mail, the man who has either directly encouraged or, at the very least, has failed to prevent, the enactment of the most restrictive Laws in recent British history has had the nerve to list the love of personal liberty as one of the defining British traits.
This, let us remind ourselves, is a man who has been at the very heart of the Labour administration for 13 years; the man, let us not forget, who was desperate for us to appreciate just how much power and influence he wielded when he was Chancellor. Nothing, apparently, got done or even considered until Gordon Brown had evaluated it, approved it and, most importantly since he held the purse strings in his great clunking fist, agreed to stump up the readies to fund it.
Thus, we can be sure that he endorsed, and still endorses, legislation that will require every freedom loving British citizen to carry an ID Card; that forces the same sons and daughters of liberty to present a passport or other photo I.D even when travelling internally by plane in the UK, that threatens them with arrest or the confiscation of their camera if they take photographs that the police might object to ( such as coppers battering demonstrators or shooting innocent Brazilian electricians) ; that treats mildly eccentric trainspotters as potential terrorists; that instructs the police to arrest innocent Christians for expressing sincerely-held, but negative, opinions about homosexuality; that removes their right (or liberty) to express beliefs, however soberly held, about other faith or belief systems; that seeks to convince us that the only way for the government to protect our hard-won liberties is to allow them at both national and local level to spy on our e-mails, on-line searches and other electronic communications; that uses Parliamentary democracy to turn one significant group of people in our society - smokers -into pariahs and sub-humans who are not allowed to enjoy the same social interaction as the rest of us in pubs, bars and restaurants.
All of these things are Gordon's legacy to us; the sum of 13 years of his management of the country. He has helped to create a police state whose intrusion and control of people's lives goes way beyond anything that George Orwell ever envisaged in 1984. With the willing assistance of the brain-dead ( Jacqui Smith), the infantile ( Harman, Milliband, Balls) and the manipulative in the shape of Mandelson, Blair and Campbell, he has attacked and all but destroyed the very British characteristics - tolerance, fair play, justice and Liberty- that he claims are so central to his being in today's Daily Mail.
And, with the hugely divisive and class-based equality legislation that Lady Longford ( AKA Harriet Harman) is introducing, the last bastions of personal liberty - including the freedom to choose work mates, business colleagues, councillors and other officials soley on their qualifications and ability to do a particular job - will be consigned to the dustbin along with freedom of speech and expression.
Brown promised an end to boom and bust. What we ended up with is the biggest bust in British hsitory. Brown, typically, says none of it is his fault. It's a global problem.
Now, he wants the British people to buy into his new-found sense of Britishness, while doing everything in his power to destroy it. When people finally wake up to what is happening; when it becomes clear that the people principally affected by anti-terorist legislation are not foreign insurgents but their own friends, family and neighbours, Brown will place the blame on everything - and everyone- but himself.
He has already seeded the ground in his Mail article, referring to " security threats that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago."
Let's see. Fifty years takes us back to 1959. True the UK didn't face the threat of Moslem terrorism that it does now. But, that's not to say that there were no threats. In no particular order, I can think of Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists, the Mau Mau in Kenya; insurgents in Malaysia and Aden. Later, from 1969 onwards, we saw the rise of the IRA, the Provisional IRA and other splinter groups all of whom regularly inflicted , or tried to inflict, terror on the British people. I am old enough to remember the bomb attacks on the Horse Guards, the Old Bailey, the Tory's Brighton hotel and the Guildford squaddies' pub; all of which were carried out by men who looked, talked and, more or less, shared the same cultural background as the bulk of the population. In that sense, they represented a much more difficult threat to counter than that posed by Moslem extremists who come from a large, but clearly dentifiable minority, of the population.
None of the measures introduced to curb the IRA campaigns - which I objected to along with many other people - were so loosely drafted as to enable local councils and other organisations to use them against innocent members of the general public. Now, we are cursed with an administration that is apparently incapable of drafting legislation of equivalent unambivalence. Instead, modern terrorism laws are so open to mis-interpretation that they have been used to spy on parents accused of placing their kids in the wrong schools, and to eject an octogenarian acivist - who had the temerity to embarass Jack Straw - from the Labour Conference.
Some might say this bad draftsmanship is inadvertent or simple incompetence. I beg to differ. This is an administration stuffed to the gills with lawyers. If the legislation allows them and their appointees to harass, observe and control the population at large then I believe it to be by design, not accident.
Whatever Gordon might write, now or in the future, about his love of liberty, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. He is an enemy of freedom and personal liberty and a real threat to democracy in this country.
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