Monday first day back after recess; I don’t know why we have these long breaks but some of us appreciate them! A brilliantly sunny day and a small orderly row of people were sitting on Westminster Hall roof with two female police officers up there on the parapet apparently admiring the view. The protesters looked just as if they were relaxing up there after a hill climb, about to unpack their sandwich lunch. No-one seemed to be taking any notice of them. I didn’t ask what they were demonstrating about; to do so would be to encourage others to the same idiocy. ( I couldn’t avoid reading later) They had abandoned the roof by the time I left at 9.15 pm. Meanwhile the security procedures at the gates continued as usual but clearly yet another security review will by now underway. No-one mentioned them inside the House, far too busy gossiping about the letters being opened down in ‘the other place’. I wonder how members of the public would feel if they were offered expenses of employment and then told 5 years later to pay it back? The employer would land up in court but such is the topsy turvy world of politics that normal rules of engagement don’t apply. Now all you angry folk out there who have tabloid like comments to offer about the expenses ‘scandal’, please feel free to make them. I am all for prosecuting the parliamentarians in both houses who dishonestly abused the system; there are relatively few of them. But the majority are neither dishonest nor immoral and this current exercise of parliament ‘putting its house in order’ is neither convincing nor remedial.
But I did participate in the dinner hour debate about the future of community pharmacy. There were no disagreements between the speakers and it has mostly been said before but these short debates do serve to inform ministers, who have to read their briefs to respond, and plants questions in civil service minds. An individual debate rarely achieves much but perhaps they work on the drip, drip, drip principle of chipping away at a topic which is important to the life of the community but doesn’t grab headlines like hospitals.
MPs claims had to be ‘wholly, exclusively and necessarily’ incurred to perform their job. If they were claiming for and having it nodded though by a system they controlled doesn’t remove that rule.
“I didn’t ask what they were demonstrating about; to do so would be to encourage others to the same idiocy. ”
Fair point, but when Parliament voted to stop protest in the environs of College Green this sort of thing was going to become inevitable. [Although maybe you will tell me Fathers For Justice were doing something similar before the ban ?]
“I wonder how members of the public would feel if they were offered expenses of employment and then told 5 years later to pay it back?”
Ah, yes, but my days of Beajolais Breakfasts and Champagne fuelled fancy dress parties + a whole lot of other jollies at the expense of a high-street bank are over 5 years ago [sniff sniff, sound of world’s smallest violin playing softly in the background] so I think I am safe and can afford to be a bit smug about the position the MPs have landed in.
Besides, I have no ambition to be an MP. This would be a bit like succumbing to going to Starbucks rather than persisting until finding a lovely tea shop serving proper tea cakes, scones and top quality char. House Of Lords, here I come !!! Once my Baldrick style ‘cunning plan’ comes to fruition..
Baroness Murphy,
You may enjoy this comment from Austin Mitchell..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6873416.ece
As he says, the civil servants have them over a barrel..
I agree with Croft. Legg is simply applying the “wholly, exclusively and necessarily” test that MPs failed to apply themselves in the first place.
Regarding how the public might feel in a similar scenario, Martin Lewis has a good point:
http://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2009/10/13/mps-expenses-payback-now-they-know-how-tax-credit-victims-feel/
No further comment is required about this rare foray by Mr Hoggart into our Lordships’ House.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/14/mps-expenses-michael-martin
Baroness Murphy,
I think that British conservatives (in the cultural not partisan political sense)feel an obligation to support “free market capitalism” much as those in the USA do. They sometimes fail to contextualize that support. I think that if power and authority in Parliament are to be treated with the right mix of deference and public scrutiny then all responsible Britons will have to acknowledge that the government is at best a counterweight to the follwing:
1.Multinational corporations that command huge budgets collectively.
2.Mass media and communications exchanges that are world wide.
3. The European Union, United Nations, International Olympics Committee, FIFA, the Red Cross and artificialy enhanced natural phenomena that are worldwide.
My point is not that these forces form a conspiracy or are evil. But as one reigns in one’s polity’s government and criticizes it one should be aware of how and with whom it may be engaged in competition.
Guido may be guilty of polemical hyperbole here.
http://order-order.com/2009/10/14/legg-a-question-of-fundamental-principles-of-propriety/
But his final paragraph emphasises some of the points above. Legg may just be trying to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted, but his standards are perhaps the ones they should have trying to enforce in the first place. Just because they were useless at ‘self-regulating’ should not blind us to that truth.
“to do so would be to encourage others to the same idiocy”
This attitude explains so much about the relationship between the public and the government. When legitimate protest is prohibited within sight of the capitol, and when peaceful protests outside of the capitol are met with thuggish police who end up killing people (and even then, more than a year later, no can even decide whether charges are warranted) there is simply no other avenue left for a person to express, publicly, his discontent than by engaging in civil disobedience. By effectively outlawing protest you turn any expression of opposition by the public into a criminal act and, by your standards anyway, a form of idiocy. And then, in the same breath, you have the gall to prattle on and complain about the expenses scandal. What is idiotic is that a bunch of public servants should have crafted a set of rules that is so self serving as to allow the most frivolous and illegitimate purchases to qualify as ‘expenses’ and at the same time have made the legitimate expression of revulsion with the state of government, the corner stone of a democracy, a criminal act. Getting your priorities straight would be a welcome change.
B, we have peaceful demonstrations and ‘legitimate protest’ most days of the week in Westminster. There is one going on right now. There are marches, rallies, public meetings in London’s parks including Parliament Square and outside the Chambers. I am sympathetic to a repeal of the SOCPA provisions restraining unplannned demonstrations around Parliament Square, the provisions are probably unnecessary, but would point out that in fact the police did almost nothing, in the interests of maintaining the peace, to intervene in the recent protests of thousands of Tamils illegally demonstrating in Parliament Square until the sheer numbers reached a dangerous size and became a threat to people moving around the area. But I don’t really understand protests of this kind either. The Tamil protesters damaged rather than enhanced their cause by not restraining themselves. The notion that there is no other avenue to express protest other than through civil disobediance is wide of the mark.
You are right that this is indeed a more important topic than MPs expenses but I make no apologies for referring to that topic again; it was what was exercising peers in the House at the time. So you agree with most everyone else about the meaning of these expenses and the Legg Enquiry. You are entitled to. Now where would you stand on the bankers?
Let us be clear, scaling a building and hanging a banner is ‘peaceful’ it is just illegal. And while you claim to have ‘legitimate protest’ around Westminster everyday the term ‘legitimate’ can only be seen as a misnomer since most of that protest is as illegal as scaling the Capitol itself and hanging a banner – so, in that sense, all unapproved protest must be a form of civil disobedience.
That fact is that protest, and the ability to be heard by one’s legislators, is a necessary part of a democracy and that has been criminalized in an increasing authoritarian Britain. You need not take my word for it, Parliament’s Committee on human rights have said the same thing. http://news.parliament.uk/2009/03/report-looks-at-policing-of-protests/
Indeed it is surprising to see so little sympathy for these protests in your posts since the situation seems exactly analogous to the one posed by the legal restrictions on Euthanasia. There you note that simply giving a nod and a wink to an illegal practice on the grounds that the law is not really consistent with the freedoms we understand people to implicitly have is an untenable situation. I suspect you too would have a difficult time figuring out how the label ‘idiocy’ could be legitmatly applied to someone who sought to end her life merely on the grounds that it was illegal to do so. But both an act of protest and the act of seeking illegal relief from one’s suffering stem from exactly the same principle. Namely; the need to have some control over one’s existence and for the things one thinks to matter in the way one’s life is run.
In the context of all that then, can’t you see how incredibly narrow the concerns over the procedural injustices of the expenses scandal look? The fact is that Parliament has spent the last half dozen years chipping away at the foundations of the liberal state and has: subjected people to unwarranted snooping, collected their most intimate genetic details, and chilled dissent without cause or oversight. Moreover, the system is blatantly two-tiered. The elite are not subject to such harassment – it the dissenters and those already marginalized that bear the brunt of this kind of thing.
And so now we finally see Parliament suffering some modicum of intrusion into their ability to police themselves and they become subject to arbitrary financial penalty – you are right this is neither “convincing nor remedial” but it is fitting. When one creates a system in which the rest of us are subject to grossly illiberal laws for the most unconvincing of reasons and when the laws that are used don’t stand to remedy the situations they were designed to address, there is very little room to complain when the status quo turns around and fixes its eyes on those that gave it life. Fairness, liberalism and a concern for the rule of law are no longer the central principles they once were and when that happens we all suffer the consequences.
B, the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights voiced concern at reports of ‘heavy handed POLICING’ of protests in the UK, that isn’t the same as Government repression. Repressive policing is the result of police fear, poor training and inadequate supervision and I would agree that needs addressing urgently.
I have said above that I believe the SOCPA law on protests around Parliament should be repealed and I am inclined to agree with you that there have been many pieces of recent legislation which are repressive. The way to change the law is to change the Government. I would defend those who wish to protest legally and peacefully within the constraints of the law as it is but I don’t support illegal demonstrations, civil disobedience (someone usually gets hurt) or the angrier ways of thrusting one’s opinions down other people’s throats.
There is little connection in reality between an unsatisfactory and abused payment system for MPs, which has been around since the 1980s and current Government’s controlling tendencies although I accept there could be a perception of a connection. I entirely accept that the current domestic preoccupations of parliament are narrow, but show me any group of employees who feel financially hard done by and mistreated and we’ll find the same sense of outrage. If MPs feel treat unfairly, and right now they do, parliamentary democracy will take a worse knock than it already has done. I think you may agree with me that if we had had external regulation of parliamentary pay, terms and conditions and standards by tradition, then we wouldn’t be in this mess now.
I think we are finding a kind of common ground.
But I still must disagree with the idea that it is the policing that is the issue and not the attitude of the state. Simply put, in a country where the government is concerned to prevent its police from acting like thugs, police act like thugs far less often. But in the UK the police make use of thuggish tactics precisely because they know they will be shielded from any real oversight and prosecution.
In fact, no officer has every been held criminally responsible for the death of someone in custody in the History of modern Britain. Not a single one! And this fact is not a testament to how evenhanded and gentle the police are, it is a testament to how unwilling any political party or legislative body has been to exercise any real oversight over the police.