Brown marooned as debates move on

So the expenses debate steams on, Brown and his attendance allowance dumped on a desert island, his cries that he was right all along receding into the distance.

As Benedict Brogan points out, John Mann is moving the debate on, relating the level of an overnight allowance to civil service levels and the cost of a room across the river.

We can ignore the pronouncements of the famously duplicitous Byers and the failed Charles Clarke, their credibility spent years ago.

But another Brown has been dumped on another desert island. This is the Brown who parrots cries about 'do nothing Tories', when we all know the big economic issues are the level of debt the state can sustain and what programmes have to be cut to stop us going over the edge.

The Tories - ever indolently behind the curve - say ... they will give this some thought. This after Vince Cable has been explaining in his sage way for the past two weeks that strategic choices have to be made, tinkering won't do, whole programmes will have to be cut, and this doesn't just mean the easy stuff like chopping ID cards.

Frank Field gets it. He writes in detail of the awesome debt that could easily overwhelm the state's finances. No one knows if it will or not. That is how bad it is. If 'the left' will not start a debate about cost cutting, it will be led by the right.

The size of the State - or what Governments can do - is going to change. If we don't have an open and full debate the new politics will quickly take on a reactionary bent.

The new politics offers a once in a generation opportunity for radical politics.

Hence:

Vince Cable and I have tabled today an Early Day Motion calling for a serious debate now, and not after the next election, on how to balance the nation's accounts.

Both these debates have moved on from Brown. His mendacious politics can have no place in either of these debates as they break new ground.

Wave Brown goodbye.

Police bribe protesters - good

The Guardian reports that

Fresh evidence has emerged of police efforts to recruit paid spies within environmental groups after the Guardian revealed that police in Scotland are running a network of hundreds of informants inside pressure groups.

Blah blah blah.

Good. It's their job.

Immigration policy

This government has allowed huge scale immigration. It had no democratic mandate for this. Any protests were caricatured as racist.

The government knowingly misrepresented the economic case, concentrating on growth on the overall size of the economy rather than the benefit to individual Britons. In fact that was unmeasurably small - if there was any at all.

Migrationwatch consistently provides the true numbers. Government has consistently rubbished them, as reported on their blog.

The immigration has been unmanageably large. Frank Field points out that immigration will account for 70 per cent of population growth in the next 20 years. In 2007, 502,000 migrants arrived in the UK - almost one every minute.

Our population is officially projected to reach 70 million by 2028 and 80 million in mid-century, with immigration the main driver and the only one that the government can directly influence.

We can admit foreign criminal gangs, but not loyal Gurkhas.

The government has hugely changed this country for ever, with no democratic mandate at all. They knew that, and deliberately stifled debate. They are not interested in responding to the electorate's concerns.

New Labour were only interested in manipulating the electorate, just as Blair and Brown - each for their own reasons - cut down anyone who might rise to challenge them.

And the opposition were too scared even to squeak.

Flying Nokias

Who pays for the breakages?

I think we can guess.

Flu

The UK "is on constant alert", according to the BBC's Fergus Walsh, who's metamorphosed into their medical correspondent.

Constant alert? As opposed to an inconstant alert?

If it's so serious, why aren't flights grounded?

New benefit fraud website

The new benefit fraud website is up in its first incarnation.

The purpose is to pull together the (now almost daily) updates in the benefit fraud blog into some overview of this problem, which is costing us taxpayers at least £2bn a year.

(Fraud minister Tony McNulty says it's £800m, or £737m if you deduct benefit fraud by expats. Seems he knows less about fraud than you might think. Perhaps he was too busy working on his expenses.)

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Local democracy

Raedwald makes a striking point about local democracy.

Only a big-bang devolution of power from central to local has a hope of realigning our public services with the expectations of those that pay for them. Locally, no-one would vote for spending a million on a safe-drinking outreach and publicity unit if they could spend the same million on putting park keepers back in their local parks. The mismatch between real public priorities and the lunatic fads and whims of Labour's embedded public management culture has never been greater. And the need for real local democratic control and the smashing of Whitehall's target and command culture has never been more urgent.

In principle this is surely right. But Cameron's shown no sign he 'gets' localism.

Even in education, where Gove champions parents' right to choose a school, and the ability for schools to contract or expand accordingly, Cameron still talks too glibly about imposing best practice. And that is in an area where local choice is a central plank of policy.

Probably the only hope for localism is for Cameron to be so weighed down by the strategic economic choices confronting him that he cannot keep close control of all his policy areas. He certainly seems unlikely to drive it.

For this would be a big change in Whitehall culture. Whitehall likes to dole out grants to councils for specific purposes on strict conditions after they have submitted detailed bids. Letting councils set their priorities according to their voters' wishes would be a wrench for bureaucrats in Hazel Blears' department - and in an era of state austerity it might cost many of them their jobs.

It would be those pesky voters again (see following post).

So progress here will depend on who he appoints as the Secretary of State. Will it be a dull functionary who just makes noises and keeps things ticking over, or will it be a genuine reformer in the Gove mould?

Party lists are undemocratic

We all know party lists are undemocratic. Party bigwigs get together behind closed doors and decide who go where on which list. The voters are nowhere in this progress.

In this country, the gruesome processes of the UKIP lists are laid bare in various blogs (for instance here). The Economist's Charlemagne tells us how they order these things in France.

One colleague taxed her about the way that the French Socialist party had drawn up its election lists for the European Parliament. As has been said on this blog before, the selection was pretty much based on the need to offer something to each major political faction in the party, rather than merit. Hard-working MEPs have been brutally evicted from winnable spots on the lists, in favour of placemen and women with powerful mentors.

Look, sighed Mrs Guigou. The problem we have is we make the lists on the basis of party factions, because the most important thing for us is to keep the party together. Even those involved in the process are "not exactly wild about it", she added.

The Socialist candidate lists "at least have the merit of existing", she went on: the ruling UMP of Nicolas Sarkozy has conspicuously failed to draw up its candidate lists, because they want to delay the start of the European election campaigns as long as possible. It is not as if the UMP lists will take long to draw up, she added, everyone knows they will be decided in the president's offices at the Elysée—and that Mr Sarkozy will use the European Parliament lists as a chance to exile those who have fallen out of his favour, "like sending them to the saltmines".

The European Union loves centralising power away from those pesky voters.

The Westminster gravy train

Heather Brooke writes that she has a TV programme this Sunday, April 19th, which is the culmination of her long investigation into parliamentary transparency. Is this a House fit for purpose? Is it reflective of a modern democracy? How can we ensure our elected politicians are representing our interests and not solely their own?
Channel 4 Dispatches: The Westminster Gravy Train.

And she mocks MPs' cheap food.

There are very few places in London where you can get a slap-up meal for less than £2.50, but Parliament is one of them.

Using freedom of information, I obtained the menus of all the restaurants and cafes in the Palace of Westminster while working on the Channel 4 Dispatches programme: The Westminster Gravy Train. The menus reveal the hugely discounted meals members have access to.

Soup for 60p! This must be the only place in London where you can get such cheap fare apart from a soup kitchen.

MPs are not poor by any means, yet their meals are being subsidised by the taxpayer.

If you go to the British Library, where there are lots of students, the food is about £4 or £5 higher. Why shouldn’t that be subsidised? Poor students, researchers and writers seem more suitable candidates for subsidy than MPs and Lords.

Promises to be worth watching.

Naughtie fails again

James Naughtie has characteristically entirely failed in Today's 8.10 interview spot to pin down Alan Johnson on the McBride story. McBride had been known as McPoison for a reason, but Naughtie never broached the history.

More interesting was Nadine Dorries on GMTV. She says she's been getting enquiries from journalists about the one night stand story "long before". She thinks McBride was preparing to resort to the blog route because he'd already failed to get the story into the mainstream media.

Yesterday Guido amusingly used the Telegraph's own blog facility.

There are a lot of bitter, jealous journalists at the Telegraph and you have behaved shamefully over the McBride story. You even tipped off Downing Street in advance as to exactly what I was up to. It reflects on you a lot more than it does on me.

You revealed sources, broke a confidence, breached a signed non-disclosure agreement and behaved like patsys for McBride.

You still failed to spoil the story. Your political team is about as weak as it gets, that is why you sucked up to Downing Street.

The Telegraph was once run by gentlemen for gentlemen. This would never have happened under Deedes or Charles Moore.

How plausible is it that these two sniggering scumbags just stopped dead in their tracks and reversed of their own accord?

And the chances must be that we'll soon see these emails in full on some overseas site.

Fewer MPs? Good

It would be nice to think that fewer MPs would mean better MPs. Alas we cannot be confident, but fewer MPs would be a start.

The Conservatives will plan to cut the number of MPs from 646 to under 600, it is reported here and here. First, if constituencies were able to cross county boundaries, they could be redrawn to be of more equal sizes than they are now.

Second, it would be sensible to consider whether constituencies should be smaller in England than in the devolved nations. That is arguable. But there is no argument for them being bigger.

A worth while reform.

MPs' expenses - renting & claiming

The Times returns to the story that Michael Martin, rented out his London flat while claiming expenses on his constituency home and living in a grace-and-favour apartment in the Palace of Westminster.

We are told he moved into the grace-and-favour home eight years ago. He then rented out his London flat for 14 months, generating an estimated £13,000, which he used to help meet the mortgage payments on the property, and other bills.

While renting out the flat, Martin declared Speaker’s House - his grace-and-favour apartment - as his main residence, enabling him to claim a second-home allowance for his constituency home in a Glasgow suburb. In 2002-3 he claimed £15,753 for the Scottish property, while in 2003-4 he claimed £9,992. The house, which cost him £173,000 in 1998, is now worth about £400,000.

Even though Martin owns the house outright, he has continued to make annual claims of up to £17,166. Under the allowance, he is entitled to claim for utilities, council tax, furniture, security, maintenance and decoration, as well as mortgage interest where applicable.

His pension scheme entitles him to half his salary as pension until his death.

He's not alone. The Telegraph tells us that sixty-five MPs are claiming expenses for a second home while earning rental income from letting out a third. "The politicians – one in ten of all MPs – have between them claimed almost £6 million since records on expenses began in 2001, an average of £85,000 each." Not small beer, then. And many of the 65 MPs have only become multiple property owners, and begun to earn rental income, since entering parliament.

James Clappison, Michael Meacher and Barbara Follett own a string of properties. Millionaire Alan Duncan owns three properties, while Gordon Brown Geoff Hoon and Margaret Beckett have claimed the allowance while living in grace-and-favour homes in London.

The largest claim for second-home allowance among any of the 65 MPs was made by Douglas Hogg, who rented three London properties to tenants while claiming £143,651 in ACA since 2001.

In case any of these MPs prating about "the rules" haven't got it yet, we pay them for - among other things - making moral judgements, and getting best value for taxpayers - most of us far poorer than they are.

On both these counts, all the MPs named here have failed.

The worst Doctor Who ever?

Was last night's Doctor Who the worst ever?

The central germ idea was excellent, the writing was so so, and some of the acting and direction was poor, while the continuous intrusive music betrayed the director's justified fear that the production just wasn't up to scratch.

Let's hope the Doctor Who team learn from this unusual failure.

East Germany lives in teaching union

Parents should be forced to send their children to the nearest school, according to teachers, reports The Telegraph. They should be stripped of the right to select state schools several miles from their home - "to stop the best schools being over-populated".

Glyn Kenyon, a secondary school teacher from Bradford, said it would mean banning faith schools from picking pupils along religious lines....

"Let's have a common policy for all schools, no real exceptions," he said. "When we have exceptions we have problems."

So inconvenient, letting people who pay for education have some voice in what should happen to their children.

Ann Nash, a primary school teacher from Bradford, told the union's annual conference on Wednesday that parents should be stripped of the power to choose between schools.

"Any admissions system which encourages parents to express their wishes is bound to have an imbalance between the number of places at popular schools and the number of parents who want to get their children into them," she said. "The only way to solve this would be to end parents' right to express a preference."

She added: "Preference and choice has created an unsustainable system. We still have children shoehorned into small classrooms."

I wonder what sort of society the teachers of Bradford would consider ideal?

A nation with no citizens - just pawns.

Eurozone - a perfect nonsense

Richard North has blogged about Anatole Kaletsky's article in The Times headed "Eurozone braces itself for the perfect storm".

What a poor piece The Times has published.

For instance, how much might it cost Germany to bail out central Europe? How much would it cost to bail out the euro-periphery?

Hell no, no numbers, just an airy assumption that it could somehow be sold to German taxpayers around election time!

Second, what's the point of putting money out unless you're pretty sure you're going to get it back? In many cases this would require hugely painful economic changes. Hence the suggestion (which I blogged here) that the IMF might formally set the conditions for the (assumed) German money - an acknowledgement of the hostility that charges of German hegemony would stir up, but a pathetic figleaf.

Many claim these economies are being protected by their eurozone membership. But this ignores the fact that that very membership helped them get into trouble in the first place, with inappropriate interest rates they could do nothing about. And now they cannot devalue, as several (e.g. Italy & Greece) traditionally have done periodically to counteract the effects of their usual economic fecklessness.

So - even if these economies could swallow the prospect of bowing the knee to (perhaps lightly disguised) German economic hegemony, could they actually be turned around so that the paymasters got their money back? Especially as eurozone membership would actually make that harder.

There is no economic cure for the struggling economies within any reasonable timescale that their democratic electorates would accept, because it would be so very painful - especially if they couldn't devalue. So - even if Germany could afford the huge sums required economically and politically - there is no prospect that most of the potential borrowers would change their behaviour enough. Especially as their currencies would probably continue to be pegged at unrealistic levels.

And their interest rates - which helped get some of them into their messes in the first place.

The Tomlinson video

It's shocking.



Somebody should go down for that. It's assault.

Lazy MPs

What is the point of MPs being on select committees if they don't take their important role seriously?

The Times has the figures, with a graphic here. If these grand, smug MPs can't be bothered to do their jobs on select committees, surely there is someone else who would? They must be blocking an MP who would do the job properly.

The Spectator Coffee House blog puts this in the context of the justified public indignation about MPs' expenses.

Every day, the papers contain new, dispiriting revelations about our political representatives. And the public's faith in the political class is being eroded to the point of destruction. This drip-drip-drip of damaging stories will continue until Parliamentarians get their House in order.

Good reading

Sue Cameron in the Financial Times has a good week this week, with the inside track on the failures at the Learning and Skills Council.

She also writes on failure being no bar to success in Whitehall, and the intention of the Commons Public Administration Select Committee to investigate people in the public sector earning over £100,000 a year.

Brown leaks budget

Mr Brown tells us the shape of the budget. What would have happened to anyone who did that while he was chancellor?

MPs' expenses - extraordinary passion

Sam Coates, who writes for The Times and runs their Red Box blog, has put up a post which is unusually impassioned for a professional political correspondent.

In the last month it's become awfully hard to find an MP prepared to speak up in support of the current system of Parliamentary expenses and the £24,000 second home allowance. Funny, that. Less than a year ago a majority of MPs - including Jacqui Smith - supported the status quo in the division lobbies. See heading under turkeys, Christmas etc.

You couldn't tell now from the fervour with which he is embracing change, but Gordon Brown didn't vote for reform. Instead he chose to abstain despite strong entreaties from advisers who wanted to show leadership on the issue (the media were told the next day he had been busy during the vote - apparently he had a haircut scheduled).

But now, after the guttersniping of Jacqui Smith, Geoff Hoon, Alistair Darling, Ed Balls, Mrs Ed Balls, Jacqui Smith again, Tony McNulty, Margaret Beckett and Jacqui Smith a third time, almost all MPs have made a principled and intellectually rigorous shift of position and now denouncing the system which has served them so handsomely for so many years, as unfit for purpose. We must reform the expenses system, they all cry in one voice.

Beware the snake oil salesmen. The system itself isn't the problem.

Sure, the overall level of what they can claim for seems absurdly high, and probably ought to be reduced. But what MPs really want to do is change the system so they receive money without submitting receipts which are then made public.

Red Box readers should think very carefully if they think this is a sensible use of public money. Seeing the receipts is the only way the electorate and the media can keep a check on their activities. It is the single biggest safeguard against abuse of the system. No MP in their right mind would buy, say, a bbq or a bath plug if they knew this would be used against them by their political opponents. Rampant, out of control spending on expenses only took place because they never imagined their claims would be made public. They hate it and they want this to end. And the political furore surrounding a handful of MPs gives them the chance.

What do we want? A lump sum no questions asked. When do we want it? Now. [Hansard]

Isn't a better idea to keep the system as it is, but reduce the amount they can claim. Then the electorate, the opposition and the media can judge each claim on its merits, and MPs will think at least twice before making any claim. Which is probably as it should be.

But with Harriet Harman promising action "soon" but a weak governing party unable to push through Parliament anything that would upset its MPs, the public look like they are about to surrender any right to know what the public money is being spent on.

And there is precious little they can do about it.

As one commenter writes:

They should operate the way they laid down rules for the Military to operate. If in London you get upto £67 for a room, £6 for incidentals and £10 for a meal, and all this has to be backed up with verifiable receipts. I am sure if it is good enough for our brave men and women of the forces it is more than adequate for MPs.

Let's not forget Alastair Darling and Gordon Brown. Or Peter and Iris Robinson. Or the backbenchers, including Jacqui Lait, Bob Neill, Harry Cohen, Rudi Vis, and James Clappison, whose Hertsmere constituency is well within commuting distance. According to the local paper, "he has gone on record on previous occasions to say he does not comment on issues relating to MPs' expenses". How very grand.

Now we have Jacqui Smith claiming she is being picked on because she is woman with no independent means. Oh please. She is a greedy embezzler of taxpayers' money pure and simple.

Rich Shaun Woodward sees nothing wrong in taking the money of poorer taxpayers, while five Sinn Fein MPs have claimed nearly half a million pounds in expenses on two rented London flats they share.

And MPs are avoiding stamp duty of more than £10,000 on second and third homes by claiming it back on their parliamentary expenses. The House of Commons as tax haven.

Among MPs who claimed a stamp duty refund is Kevin Brennan, a Cabinet Office minister. He bought a flat in London in July 2007 and claimed back stamp duty of £10,200....

Theresa Villiers, the north London MP and shadow transport minister, has also claimed her stamp duty. She bought a flat within walking distance of the Commons in January last year, in addition to a property in outer London, and was able to claim £10,350 in stamp duty on expenses.

All these people have too little regard for taxpayers.