I have to say I like Red Toryism, and some Labour MPs are right in that if the Tories did actually end up inhabiting that territory then Labour would face serious, permanent electoral difficulties…
Again, Sunny and I agree on something.
When I heard about Gordon Brown's plan to give people legal entitlements to public services I began to wonder whether he had finally lost it. In the same week that the OECD issued stark warnings about the UK's rising debt and implored the government to cut public spending, is this really the right time to enshrine that spending in law? Surely the idea is madness.
But another thought occurred to me. Perhaps this is deliberate. He is doing this to leave a poison pill for David Cameron in the form of legally binding spending pledges. Then Polly Toynbee let the cat out of the bag this morning. It's not, as I thought, a poison pill. It's a bloody great landmine!
As with fixing the climate change and child poverty targets into law, these "rights" to services will nail down enormous spending commitments, making it harder for any Conservative government to shrink the social state. It's a spending landmine, forcing Labour priorities on to the years ahead.
A couple of years ago I wrote about the slow ratcheting up of the state and how difficult it would be to stop it growing, let alone roll it back. As it is, public spending cuts on the scale the country needs will be fought at every turn by trade unions. One economist recently warned of a workplace guerrilla war in the public sector. Give people legal rights to services and benefits and that war will have to be fought out in the courts too. Any savings will have to be offset against the cost of making the cuts.
Of course, the Tories could repeal the laws but that would take time and delay their programme. It would also enable Labour to paint the Tories as the nasty party.
The Labour Party has realised it is going to be kicked out and has decided to make life as difficult as possible for the incoming government. It is a cynical ploy. If nothing is done about it, the OECD calculates that the UK's debt could be over 100% of GDP by the next election. When the money runs out and public services collapse under the strain of these demands, who will the voters blame? The Tory government or Gordon who planted all the debt bombs?
Despite all the fine words after the banking crash last year, it seems that it's business as usual again in the City. While the rest of us suffer from the fallout created by the casino banking system, bonuses are back for the privileged few.
Our savings have been wiped out, our public services will be cut, many of us have lost our jobs and, whoever wins the next election, we'll all have to pay more tax to pay off the country's crippling debt. The casino banking system was at the heart of this disaster and, to add insult to injury, a sizeable slice of the debt we now have to cover went to finance bank bailouts.
OK, not all the banks received state aid directly. But the various government rescue schemes around the world were not about saving individual banks; they were about propping up the entire banking system. The large financial institutions were all dependent on each other. If one bank fell, some of those it owed money to would fail and then their creditors, in turn, would fail too. When Lehmans crashed, it set off a chain reaction which dragged others down too. Like climbers on a treacherous mountain, the banks were all roped together. The more of them that slipped, the more likely it became that the others would fall off too.
As Robert Peston showed, Goldman Sachs effectively received $13bn from the US taxpayer; money owed to it by AIG which would have failed but for the government's intervention. Barclays, SocGen and Deutsche bank also received billions from the US treasury via AIG. The same story applies to creditors of RBS and HBOS. Had these huge banks crashed, a lot of other banks would have gone with them.
Even if they didn't receive bailout money directly, all the banks owe their survival in their current form to government-funded bailouts. There are a lot of people, not only in the state-owned banks, who would not have jobs today if the British taxpayer had not been forced to help out.
So how come they can get away with paying themselves such huge amounts again even while the rest of the economy is mired in recession?
Because the government did not take the opportunity to regulate their behaviour.
As I said during last autumn's banking crisis, banks are effectively part of the infrastructure. As with public utilities, hospitals and schools, the government can't allow them to fail. I've just finished reading Vince Cable's book and he says pretty much the same thing:
Whatever prior assurances were given, the government of the day would be bound in practice to rescue major, apparently systemically important institutions.....All of which suggests that, in the real world, governments will necessarily intervene and they should accept this from the outset and move towards the treatment of banks as regulated utilities.
Let's hear no more about shareholders' rights or freedom from regulation. These organisations exist by the good grace of the taxpayer and they should be brought into line accordingly. They should be broken up and the riskier activities hived off into new institutions without government protection.
A good idea for tackling excessive bonuses came from the German Social Democratic Party, which proposed a cap on the amount that companies can offset against tax. Under this scheme, any remuneration over 1 million Euros per executive could not be claimed against a corporate tax bill. In other words, if a bank's shareholders are so convinced that someone is worth more than £860,000, which is still a vast fortune to most people, then they must pay the full cost of the excess. That would certainly focus a few minds.
The government has had nine months to put new regulations in place but it has faffed about and has only just come up with a set of weedy proposals. Consequently, while the government, FSA and Bank of England argue, the banks are going back to their old ways and, if they are not stopped, the whole cycle will begin again.
Sorry for the lack of posting here over the last couple of weeks. I've been very busy with work. I suppose I should be thankful, given that many people are out of work or worried about their jobs, but it doesn't leave much time for blogging or keeping up to date with the news.
Which is why I almost forgot that today is Armed Forces Day.
That said, you could be forgiven for not knowing about Armed Forces Day at all. Our media have been too busy producing eight-page spreads and rolling news bulletins about the death of a neurotic pop star to say much about honouring our armed forces.
Despite the lack of publicity, people have organised hundreds of events which are taking place today and over the next week or so. There's a full list here.
Some on the left have attempted to paint Armed Forces Day as a government ploy to gain legitimacy for its actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's not what it's about.
I have mixed feelings about the venture in Iraq but that's what our elected government decided to do and our troops just had to get on with it. It is mean spirited to use that as an excuse to undermine brave men and women who, regardless of their personal views, were doing their duty.
So raise a glass to the members of our armed forces or, better still, buy them a drink if you can get along to one of the events. It's important to show that most ordinary people support the armed forces, even if some of our so-called opinion formers don't.
Martin Woollacott reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West in the Guardian. His review is interesting because it' s the first time I have seen a Guardian writer admit that mass immigration has been detrimental to European countries.
Where he [Caldwell] is right is in underlining the fact that immigration was encouraged by elites who took a ludicrously short-sighted view of its costs and consequences. The idea was to prop up industries already in decline and, later, to staff industries, such as health and tourism, the full cost of which our societies refused (and continue to refuse) to pay. The manning of underpaid and menial positions could be maintained only by a constant influx of new migrants, since people in established migrant communities either got better jobs or chose, like many in the native white population, to depend on the welfare state and to have no jobs at all. More recently, immigration has been defended as a way of making up for falling birth rates when, as Caldwell points out, it would have to be multiplied an unfeasibly large number of times to have that effect.
So it wasn't done to give us economic prosperity and to pay for all our pensions then? Who'd have thought it, eh?
This inherently unstable and dysfunctional system was set in motion, in other words, for no good reason. Those who started it off did not foresee how big it would become, nor the mechanisms of family reunion and arranged marriages that would drive it on even when restrictions were belatedly imposed. Most of them did not imagine, says Caldwell, that the newcomers would "retain the habits and cultures of southern villages, clans, marketplaces, and mosques".
Ah, that reverse colonialism again. I seem to remember Bradford council's former Race Relations Officer mentioning that.
Martin Woollacott doesn't agree with everything that Christopher Caldwell says, but he concludes:
But he is right to argue that immigration on the scale that Europe has experienced constitutes a risky experiment to which we need not have submitted ourselves, and of which the final result is not yet clear. He is right that we frequently talk about it in stupid and dishonest ways. If his book sharpens a so far sluggish debate, it will have served an important purpose.
And that from a Grauniad journalist too!
I have ordered Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. As soon as I've read the thing, which at this rate will be sometime in the autumn, I will post a review of it here.
As I said yesterday, the election of two BNP members has stirred up the political establishment and the media. For most of this week, commentators have exhorted the main parties to fight the BNP by addressing the grievances which lead people to support it.
So, we must crack down on immigration to stop the BNP. We must build more houses to stop the BNP. We must create more jobs to stop the BNP. We must tackle deprivation in white working class areas to stop the BNP. We must change the electoral system to stop the BNP. If even a fraction of what the pundits say should be done actually does get done, the BNP, with its 943,598 votes, could turn out to be the most influential minor party of all time.
The political establishment's, and especially the left's, obsession with the BNP is something I find perplexing. The relatively small party provokes a reaction out of all proportion to its size. Just look at the column inches over the last week.
As Ian Jack remarks, some of this may be because the BNP enables the other political parties to take the moral high ground. Just as prisoners who have committed terrible crimes look down on sex offenders, comforting themselves with the thought that, whatever they have done, they are not as bad as the nonces, so the main political parties can look down on the BNP. Sure they may be riddled with low-level corruption and have presided over economic and social collapse, but at least they are not Fashiiiists!
But there's something else going on too; a much deeper fear that the BNP engenders.
It's not the fear of an imminent electoral challenge. After all, other minor parties like the SNP, the Greens and, especially, UKIP look more threatening to the big three.
The comparison between UKIP and the BNP is illuminating.
When UKIP gained its first three European seats in 1999 it caused only a minor stir. Even its jump to twelve MEPs five years later and its thirteen in last week's election have not been causes for alarm among the major parties. There were no Stop UKIP articles in the papers last week. Journalists and politicians didn't rush to attack the party. They are clearly far more relaxed about UKIP's 16.5% of the vote than they are about the BNP's 6.2%.
Perhaps this is a reasonable assessment of UKIP's electoral threat. UKIP is a quinquennial party. It erupts in a riot of colour once every five years then lies dormant, sometimes looking as if it is dead, for the next half-decade.
It is easy for the establishment to write UKIP off. Its MEPs, most of its activists and, probably, a large number of its voters are comfortably off financially. They might rant about foreigners, regulation and the EU but none of these things are an immediate threat to them. They may sound angry but really they're not. They're just a bit cross. Once they have sounded off at the golf-club bar and cast their votes for UKIP, they will go back to relatively secure and comfortable lives. That is why UKIP never capitalises on its Euro-election successes. Despite the rhetoric, its members are just irritated, rather than genuinely threatened, by what they see going on around them. Most have no real interest or motivation to change the status quo.
The BNP, on the other hand, represents something much darker. For at least the past 200 years, the political establishment has been terrified of an angry working class. This is as true of the ruling elite's new left-wing members as it is of its old Tory ones. They are especially scared of working-class dissent that falls outside the control of the trade union movement. History shows that aggrieved peasants and artisans make bloodier revolutionaries than the more disciplined unionised proletariat.
Unlike UKIP's activists, many of these aggrieved workers are not just having a moan for the hell of it. They have seen the places where they live change beyond all recognition as immigrants have moved in around them. Their children are being taught alongside pupils speaking a multitude of languages. Teachers struggle just to maintain order in the classrooms. When their children leave school they have to live at home or move away because of the shortage of housing. As the community breaks up, criminals move in, unchecked by an ineffective punishment system. Then, to cap it all, a further wave of EU migrants arrives, driving down wages and stretching services to breaking point.
BNP activists and voters are angry in a totally different way from those in UKIP. Their comfort and security really are under threat or, in some cases, have disappeared altogther. This fear and fury is far more widespread than the six percent of the population that voted BNP. Nearly a million people are so angry and afraid that they are prepared to vote for a party that excludes some of their friends from membership and which is led by a man who once tried to do a funding deal with Gaddafi. Many more people are just as fearful and enraged yet they are still not prepared to vote BNP. At least, not yet.
In a sense, the combination of BNP and the proportional electoral system has sounded an alarm. As Michael Collins says, many working-class people feel disenfranchised; sidelined and demonised. Add to that the fears about crime, jobs and the loss of the social scaffold that their communities once provided and you are faced with some very angry, very frightened people with very little left to lose.
That's what really scares the politicians, journalists, business leaders, civil servants and opinion formers who make up the political establishment. Which is why they have spent so much time over the last week discussing a very small party that only got 6.2% of the vote.
The election of two BNP candidates to the European Parliament has caused a predictable storm. However, the media and the political establishment's obsession with Nick Griffin and his party might create some useful by-products.
This week, we have found out that Nick Griffin will get fully equipped offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, an annual salary of €91,980, an allowance for costs of €50,424 and a staff budget of €210,480. For every day he turns up to the parliament he will get €298.
If he manages to form a bloc with other like minded parties he will get even more cash. Possibly over €100,000 a year.
In addition, there will be all expenses paid foreign trips, access to the House of Commons and use of the facilities and a guaranteed invitation to Buckingham Palace garden parties. In spite of all the fuss earlier this year, it seems that Nick Griffin will be sipping champagne on the palace lawn after all.
Of course, all MEPs have been getting these perks for years but few people in the media seemed very interested.
Yet in the four days since Nick Griffin was elected there have been more reports about MEPs' entitlements than in the previous four years.
Whatever you think of the BNP, they seem to have achieved what most people throught was impossible; they have made the European Parliament interesting - or, at least, interesting to our mainstream media which hitherto has paid it very little attention.
No doubt the media circus will now follow the BNP members to Brussels and Strasbourg, waiting to pounce if they consort with Euro-fascist loons or make any racist gaffes. That can only be a good thing. Perhaps now we'll find out what really goes on in the European Parliament.
This made me laugh.
The Labour Party is reeling from its local election defeats, mostly at the hands of the Tories. The party has gone into a self-induced hysteria and blood letting. All David Cameron needs to do is stand on the sidelines and watch as Labour destroys itself.
Great news for the Tory groupies, perhaps, but is it good news for the rest of us? Labour is now in such disarray that the Conservatives could win an election without even publishing a manifesto. And, if he could get away with it, that would probably be David Cameron's preferred strategy.
The reason Labour was so badly damaged by the expenses scandal and the Tories emerged relatively unscathed is simple. The Tory spin was better. Their MPs were just as excessive, if not more so, than Labour and Cameron's own expenses show that he too manipulated the system to ensure maximum gain. But, as you would expect from a smooth PR operator, he did it in such a way that it would be easy to deflect criticism.
David Cameron's handling of the expenses row has been a masterpiece of style over substance. He has successfully deflected most of the criticism onto the government, aided and abetted by the self-destructive panic in the Labour ranks.
Labour's disarray makes it even easier for Cameron to avoid coming up with any concrete policies. By allowing themselves to be spooked by the expenses scandal, Labour MPs did much of Cameron's hard work for him during the local elections. By continuing with their plotting and internal strife, they are putting even less pressure on him to come out and tell the electorate what he stands for. If there were a general election tomorrow no-one would have a clue what David Cameron would do if he were elected but most would still go out and vote for him simply because he is not Gordon Brown.
Like many people, I would like to know what the Tories would do if they were elected. Most importantly, I want to know how they would tackle the country's debt, which services they would cut and which taxes they would increase to pay it off.
A weak Labour party might be great for the Tory tribe but it doesn't do the voters any favours. I'm hoping that Labour makes at least a modest recovery over the next few months so that our government-in-waiting is forced to tell us what it plans to do. A general election should be a contest not a shoo-in. Someone needs to give the Tories a run for our money.
While our governing party was self-destructing and its politicians were fighting like rats in a sack, the survivors of a bygone age once again did this country proud yesterday.
Many veterans travelled to Normandy for the 65th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. The youngest of them are now in their early eighties, most are even older than that. All of them, especially those from the USA and Canada, had made long and tiring journeys to be there, yet they stood to attention through all the speeches, many of them holding up regimental banners. I reckon I'd be exhausted after such a day and I'm only half their age.
Yesterday's events were billed as the last major D-Day reunion but the BBC's James Naughtie remarked that, having witnessed the energy and spirit of the veterans, he'd be very surprised if they are not back next year. Let's hope he's right.
These men went through an experience that most of us can't imagine. The cadets who had been invited to attend the ceremony were clearly in awe of these old men and rightly so.
The debt that we owe them is enormous and difficult to put into words but, at the end of the BBC's coverage yesterday, one of the old soldiers summed up what it was all about. I can't find it among the BBC's videos of the event but this is pretty much what he said:
We were fighting for something you can't touch, you can't eat and you can't smell. But by golly, you'd know about it if you lost it. That thing is called freedom.
Or, at least, that's what Nigel Farage appears to be saying. He's demanding a re-run of the European elections because UKIP's name was below a fold in the ballot paper.
Now I went to vote yesterday, the people gave me my ballot paper, folded it into four so it would go into the ballot box then gave it to me. I unfolded it, looked at all the options, including UKIP, stuck my cross down, folded the thing up again as it had been given to me, then shoved it in the ballot box.
It was really easy to open up and really easy to fold up again.
I wonder if Mr Farage thinks his party might not do as well as the media hype predicted. Is this ridiculous folded ballot paper complaint his get-out?
Five years ago, Aidan Rankin, author of The Politics of the Forked Tongue: Authoritarian Liberalism, quit UKIP in disgust. In an article for the New Statesman he explained why:
My attraction to Ukip took me into a peculiar demi-monde, peopled largely by men with faces red through alcohol and outrage against the modern world, ladies with affected accents or strange hats, and youthful zealots who collected "facts" about Europe or immigration the way better-adjusted young men collect train numbers.
A fine example of a man given to such red-faced outrage is the increasingly ridiculous Godfrey Bloom. In a tactic favoured by blustering corporate bullies the world over, he tells the European Parliament to shut up about banking regulation because he was in the financial services industry and is therefore the only one allowed to have an opinion.
Apparently, Mr Bloom is also on record as saying that he has never changed his mind about anything. Most probably because he never listens to anyone else.
It's another trait of golf-club bores; their ears close as soon as their mouths open.
So, if you want even more pompous self-opinionated old farts in the European Parliament, pontificating like this and eating nice lunches at your expense, remember to vote UKIP tomorrow.
There was a piece on the radio today about the development of wind power in Texas.
But, of course they don't have wind farms there, they have wind ranches!
After three weeks of their expense claims being published in the Telegraph, MPs might have hoped that public anger would have died down a bit by now. Instead, though, people seem to be getting ever more angry by the day.
To an extent, some of this outrage seems overblown. Sure, some of the property fiddles, like flipping second homes, forgetting you've paid off your mortgage, enriching or subsidising members of your family and avoiding capital gains tax are verging on fraud. But some of the other claims would probably not be out of place for many corporate executives who are asked by their employers to work away from home for a long period of time.
Senior employees of large organisations, like oil companies, banks and accountancy firms, if they are required to work abroad, often have lavish second homes paid for by the company. It is not unusual for fixtures, fittings and gardening expenses to be paid for by the firm. OK, they might not stretch to duck houses and moat cleaning but trees and fencing would probably be covered, especially if the executive was expected to use his house and garden for entertaining.
Public anger now seems so intense that few people are making such distinctions. The revelation of any large claim is met with outrage and there is no point in an MP trying to explain or justify it.
Some commentators see this as sanctimonious righteous indignation. Thomas Macaulay's observation that "there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality" has been quoted more than once over the past week or so. And, according to some payroll experts, many of those expressing anger at the MPs' excesses will have claimed bogus expenses themselves at some time during their working lives. So you can add hypocrisy to righteous indignation.
Others, most notably Nadine Dorries, see the expenses scandal as a deliberate attempt by Telegraph owners the Barclay Brothers to influence the European elections and Tory policy. (She was forced to take the allegations off her blog. Her post is reproduced here if you want to read it.)
But, whatever the Telegraph's agenda, you can't agitate people if they are not already aggrieved about something. If there was widespread respect for our political class, there would not have been anywhere near the level of sustained public anger we have seen over the past few weeks. That many of these expense claims are trivial and that many of us have also bent the rules on our expense claims is beside the point because this collective outrage has much deeper roots.
For many years now, people have been feeling increasingly frustrated and powerless. As usual, working class people were the first to feel it as immigration changed the urban landscape, put pressure on local services and led to increased competition for work. More recently, rural areas have found themselves subjected to the same pressures. Then middle-class people began to feel threatened too as their incomes were left behind by those of the super-rich. Their children could no longer afford to live in the areas in which they grew up and higher education, once almost a right, was priced beyond many people's reach.
As TUC leader Brendan Barber explained last week:
Middle-income Britain did not share in the largesse of the boom years. One study shows that real hourly wage rates for median earners grew by only 0.1% a year between 2002 and 2007.
A sense of anger was growing too about the state of public services. Even when they had been sold off, few benefits seemed to come to consumers. The privatised utilities treated people just as badly, if not worse, than their nationalised predecessors, only now people couldn't complain to their MPs as the state didn't run the show any more. The government subsidised rich businessmen to run the railways and corporations were able to make huge amounts of money out of NHS PFI deals. Many people suspected that the taxpayer was being fleeced but the mechanics of these deals were too complex for most of us to understand. The move to local accountability for NHS trusts passed most people by too. Few of us know how our local NHS trust boards are chosen or how we could influence them.
All the while, people were assured that all this was part of the dynamism that was re-shaping Britain into a global economy and bringing us unparalleled prosperity. Ministers boasted that Britain was the most open economy in the world. Immigrants, it was argued, created jobs and helped the economy to grow. PFI deals and privatisation brought market disciplines to public services and made them more efficient. The rise of the super-rich was good for us as they spent money and it trickled down into the economy. Sure, there were some temporary downsides but the increased prosperity brought by our globalised economy would sort it all out in the end. Public services would improve, immigrants' taxes would pay for the increased demands on healthcare, transport and school places, the booming economy would create more jobs and debt-laden graduates would easily be able to pay off their student loans as the demand for their skills rose.
It still sounded unconvincing to many of us but the soothing voices of politicians and journalists dampened down the feelings of suppressed rage.
Then the dam burst. The epitome of our globalised economy, the casino banking system based mostly in London and New York, collapsed and dragged the world economy into a recession. As one of the most globalised economies, with the biggest banks, the UK was hardest hit and had to pay out the second largest amount in bailouts.
People realised that they had been right to be worried. All the frustration that had built up over the years was vented against the bankers. But the problem here was that the banks, like the privatised utilities and PFI companies, were faceless and anonymous. It was difficult to blame specific people for specific crimes. Apart from the few on whom the media spotlight fell, like Fred Goodwin and Andy Hornby, most of the people who had created the financial crisis had long since taken the money and run, leaving the little people to face an angry public.
We knew that some people had made a lot of money by exploiting migrant labour, both legal and illegal. We knew that some people had made a lot of money from PFI deals, from running rail franchises and from privatised utilities. And we knew that a few people had made staggering amounts of money from manipulating the financial system and betting with our savings. But, for the most part, we didn't know who they were or exactly how much they had taken us for.
The MPs' expenses scandal was different because, for the first time, an angry public could link specific abuses and specific amounts to specific people. Years of frustration and powerlessness had led to a build-up of anger and it crystallised around the issue of MPs expenses.
Which is why the fury is showing no signs of dissipating. It is not a sense of outrage over a media story that has made headlines over the past few weeks. It is the culmination of years of frustration and anger against a political class that is seen to serve the interests of the few at the expense of everyone else.
Of course, this is a little unfair. Some MPs, like Frank Field, understand how people feel:
Listen carefully when many of them talk. They express a great love for their country, think it is becoming the pits, and have real anger against a political class who won't talk about non-PC issues like immigration.
Voters see their country changing and are refused a chance, through any of the three main parties, to register their disapproval, let alone embrace a new approach.
Most of them kept quiet, though, and have only themselves to blame now that the public has blown its collective top.
It is a shame that it has taken something like this to make MPs and party leaders suddenly start falling over themselves to promise more people power. If they had had their ears to the ground in the first place they would have known how angry people were.
The outrage has not come from nowhere. Anger and dissatisfaction with the political system and the elites who run it has been building up for years. It's almost as if people were just waiting for something on which they could focus their sense of frustration. The MPs expenses scandal provided that focus. As Brendan Barber rightly says, this was just the last straw.
Here's a good wheeze.
Attack a boat from a liberal western country. If you succeed, you get a ransom to release the crew. If you fail and get arrested you get sent for trial in that liberal western country where the prisons are more comfortable than your house back home and you can get a qualification at state expense. Safe in the knowledge that you can't be deported because the country you came from has a poor human rights record, you can then send for your wife and family to join you.
Somali pirate Farah is well chuffed. As his lawyer explained:
My client feels safe here. His own village is dominated by poverty and the sharia but here he has good food and can play football and watch television. He also thinks the lavatory in his cell is fantastic.
He hopes to follow a computer course in prison and bring his family over here.
Well, you'd be daft not to wouldn't you?
Here's a case which got the lawyers excited, although it doesn't seem to have made the mainstream press yet.
A tribunal has ruled that environmentalism counts as a "religious or philosophical belief" for the purposes of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.
Tim Nicholson was head of sustainability for Grainger Plc but was made redundant. He claimed that he had been unfairly selected for redundancy because of his beliefs about climate change and that Grainger Plc was threfore guilty of discrimination on the ground of religion or belief.
Mr Nicholson argued that his beliefs were "not merely an opinion, but a philosophical belief which affects how I live my life including my choice of home, how I travel, what I buy, what I eat and drink, what I do with my waste and my hopes and my fears."
The employment tribunal agreed and found in his favour.
This is the first time a court has ruled specifically that an essentially political beleif is covered by the legislation. The ruling has implications for those who fear discrimination in the workplace based on their views. Trade Unions campaigning to have BNP members banned from employment in the public sector will, no doubt, be dismayed by this ruling.
However, Mr Nicholson has been lucky. The law was changed in 2007 to protect "any religious or philosophical belief" but the government now wants to close that loophole again. The Equality Bill currently before Parliament removes protection for "political beliefs and beliefs in scientific theories".
Now why would the government want to do that, I wonder?
I've long been in favour of electoral reform but I can't help wondering whether plunging the country into the uncertainty of a new voting system would be helpful right now.
Whoever wins the next election will have to make some tough choices. Drastic cuts in public spending will be needed if the country is to reduce its levels of debt.
Reducing government waste is always a good political rallying cry but those who shout loudest about it rarely mention specifically what they would like to see cut. There are two types of government waste. For the sake of simplicity, let's call them Type A waste and Type B waste.
Type A waste comes from inefficiency; the sort of waste you get in any organisation. Type B waste is that which comes from the government doing things you don't think it should be doing. Type A waste can be reduced by making processes and the deployment of people more efficient. What constitutes Type B waste is largely a matter of opinion.
There is certainly a lot of fat in the public sector. Processes are inefficient and decision making is painfully slow. Many senior public servants are highly intelligent people who therefore tend to over-engineer solutions to simple problems. Undoubtedly, there is plenty of Type A waste which can be removed by simplifying and streamlining the way public sector organisations work. The government's own Operational Efficiency Programme calculated that £15bn a year could be saved by making the public sector more efficient.
But, on its own, that is unlikely to be enough. To cut public spending by the sort of numbers quoted by PwC last week means that the Type B waste will have to be tackled too. In short, the government will have to stop doing a lot of things that it currently does and that voters have got used to it doing. And that is a political question.
Everyone broadly agrees that government should be more efficient but when the discussion turns to cutting long-standing public services, then it will get nasty. Try this out on your friends over a few drinks. Take a look at this handy chart showing public spending for 2009. Where would you make cuts? What would you tell the government to stop doing? Remember, you've got to get at least £115bn and ideally £133bn off the total. That should keep you occupied for a few hours.
Cutting public spending will be a difficult and contentious task. The IMF doesn't believe that the political will exists to take on the challenge. Neither does credit ratings agency Standard and Poors which, as the FT noted, led it to raise the prospect of removing the UK's AAA rating. The chaos brought about by the MPs expenses row has left many wondering whether the British political system is so mortally wounded that it is incapable of implementing the necessary reduction in public spending.
As Tim Montgomerie pointed out, it would not go down well for MPs to advocate public spending cuts to voters who are convinced that most of them have been living the high life at the taxpayers' expense. The usual rhetoric about belt-tightening would be met with derision, or worse. The moral authority of MPs has been damaged and it will be much harder over the next few years for them to argue in favour of massive cuts to public spending.
Which brings me back to electoral reform. Wouldn't a new electoral system cause even more chaos? It would create an unfamiliar sort of parliament and would inevitably make the process of government harder until everyone got used to it. It would also divert attention away from other pressing issues. It would give the cowards and procrastinators an ideal excuse to put off tough financial decisions for another few years. If organisations like the IMF and S&P are already expressing doubts about the capacity of Britain's politicians to manage the county's way out of debt, surely a new electoral system will erode their confidence even further.
Of course, the counter-argument is that reform of the electoral system could restore Parliament's battered authority and make the necessary brutal but honest conversations with the voters more likely. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Like most western economies, the UK is in a financial mess. Changing the voting system is a wonderful idea but we should have done it years ago when times were better. As it is, electoral reform is a nice-to-have. The most pressing issue for the next government will be to find ways of paying off our ballooning debts. Everything else might just have to wait.
To put it mildly, Nadine Dorries is not my favourite MP. She has a history of making wild claims and spurious arguments. Other bloggers have already done sterling work to expose some of her wilder claims so I won't bother going into the detail here. For anyone who is interested, I recommend Devil's Mad Nad series for some entertaining posts about the member for Mid-Bedfordshire.
But today I find myself in the curious position of having to defend her because my belief in free speech is stronger than my dislike of Ms Dorries.
Nadine's blog, in which she accused the Daily Telegraph and its owners, the Barclay Brothers, of an anti-democratic witch hunt against MPs, has been taken down after legal action by lawyers acting for the Telegraph.
Fortunately, Dr Crippen, hardly one of Mad Nad's greatest fans either, had made a copy of the article and has posted it so that we can all see what the Telegraph and its owners didn't want us to read.
It looks pretty much like a typical Dorries rant; long on opinion and allusion but short on real data. Surely the appropriate response from a powerful newspaper like the Telegraph should have been to run an article rebutting her allegations. Instead, it took the cowardly option of using its vast resources to force her service provider to remove her blog. I would have dismissed this piece as paranoid fantasy but for the fact that the Telegraph and its owners don't want people to read it. Whenever that happens, I start to wonder if there is, perhaps, a grain of truth in the allegations. It is certainly true that the Barclay Brothers are not above using their financial muscle to bully others in an attempt to influence the political process.
Even those who can't stand the woman have leapt to Nadine's defence. Craig Murray, Peter Black, Rob Parsons, Longrider and Justin, among others, have attacked the Telegraph's action. Even Mr Eugenides grudgingly condemned the censorship.
Nadine Dorries's blog is cached here but, just in case that gets taken down too, I have followed Dr Crippen's lead and re-posted the offending article below. Read it and make up your own mind.
Posted Thursday, 21 May 2009 at 17:04
Just park a couple of facts for a moment, which you may not agree with but are factual.
The first is that MPs have always been encouraged, by whatever means possible, to draw down their ACA allowance in full. This is because it was upped in place of an appropriate pay rise.
The rules surrounding the ACA were deliberately sloppy in order to maximise the opportunity that MPs had to draw.
This was always felt to be the safest political method to remunerate MPs, rather than face the media backlash of a pay rise.Parliament is in chaos. The public are angry. The Telegraph has upped its circulation.
There are 650 members of Parliament. In any walk of life, in whatever profession, you will find people who are dishonest. It will always be thus as long as we are all human!The Telegraph are uncovering a few cases of fraud, but not enough, so they are more than slightly embellishing some of the stories. I write as a case in point.
Enter the Barclay brothers, the billionaire owners of The Daily Telegraph.
Rumour is that they are fiercely Euro sceptic and do not feel that either of the main parties are Euro sceptic enough. They have set upon a deliberate course to destabilise Parliament, with the hope that the winners will be UKIP and BNP.A quick online check of the Barclay brothers and their antics on the Island of Sark is enough to give this part of the rumour credence.
Another rumour is that the disc was never acquired and sold by an amateur, but it was in fact a long term undercover operation run by the Telegraph for some considerable time, carefully planned and executed; and that the stories of the naive disc nabber ringing the news desk in an attempt to sell the stolen information are entirely the work of gossip and fiction.
These rumours do have some credibility given that this has all erupted during the European Election Campaign and turn out is expected to be high with protest votes, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, or should I say the Barclay brothers.
Now, if this is all a power game executed by the BBs, how would they do that?
It is a fact that these men are no fools and are in fact self-made billionaires.
I would imagine and believe that if any of this is true, they know the British psyche well enough to whip up a mood of public anger, hence the long running revelations in the DT.Where do I get this from? Well, at heart I am just a cheeky scouser. I like to go into the rooms of the faceless and nameless in Parliament, sit on their desk and ask pertinent questions like: who are you? What do you do? I've made friends with one or two. One in particular I am very fond of. He is a mine of very astute information; and whilst in his office yesterday, we chunnered over the 'what is this all about?' question.
He reckons this is all a power game. That the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want.
His very poignant words to me were “if any of this conjecture is true, Parliament will become full of racists, fantasists, and has-been celebrities. We will be rendered impotent and may never again regain the authority to withstand the pressure, opinion and whims of the overtly wealthy.
Scary stuff!
It's not often I agree with Polly Toynbee but she's right when she says:
[T]he cardinal rule for all in the public eye: do nothing you would squirm to see reported.
These days, the public is more forgiving than it was. Infidelity and weird sexual practices between consenting adults barely raise a murmur. Usually the newspapers are more outraged than most voters about these stories. But when it comes to public money, people are less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. It is just about possible to argue that some of the MPs' expenses that have been reported were legitimate, given the demands of their jobs, but as soon as the argument gets complicated it is lost, as Margaret Beckett found out on Thursday's Question Time. As Polly says, it is far better not to have it reported in the first place.
And that's what most MPs assumed would never happen. Had they thought for a moment that any of this would get out, they would not have claimed for moat cleaning and chandeliers and certainly wouldn't have asked the taxpayer to subsidise their bewildering and ever-changing property portfolios.
This charade of paying money the money back fools no-one. It makes MPs look like guilty schoolchildren. We know they wouldn't have done it if they hadn't been caught.
But they were and now they are squirming. I have little sympathy. The guilty MPs ignored that golden rule and they will pay the price at the next election - that's if their local constituencies haven't deselected them first.
Recent Comments