Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Ordering the courts not to interfere in a matter that is in the competence of the courts
On the face of it this is a disgraceful action by the law officers of this coalition government tamely continuing a degrading New Labour procedure..
I trust that Liberal ministers will not be inhibited from reporting back what can be reported on this and that our backbenchers are not inhibited from telling the Liberal front bench in particular and the government in general front bench exactly what a crock of shit this approach is.
In fact I hope there is a massive row behind the scenes in government and that Immigration minster Damian Green is suitably chastised.
As the Guardian reports:
The one good thing is that previously secret (or at least vigorously obscured) government instructions for similar actions have now been made public.
I trust that Liberal ministers will not be inhibited from reporting back what can be reported on this and that our backbenchers are not inhibited from telling the Liberal front bench in particular and the government in general front bench exactly what a crock of shit this approach is.
In fact I hope there is a massive row behind the scenes in government and that Immigration minster Damian Green is suitably chastised.
As the Guardian reports:
And since this was actually the implementation of a policy put into place by Labour, don’t let them of the hook either. Labour should be trusted on NOTHING relating to their floundering after teh mess they helped cause in Iraq.Government lawyers have warned high court judges that last-minute legal challenges should not be allowed to "disrupt or delay" a deportation flight to Baghdad due to leave Britain early tomorrow. (That is today, Wednesday 9th)
This is the first time the detailed operations of the "special arrangements" surrounding such deportation flights have become public. But the immigration minister, Damian Green, said they were standard procedure and had been used in 16 previous flights to northern Iraq.He said: "In line with published policy, the UK Border Agency has written to the high court in advance of every charter flight since 2005 setting out why they are taking place and explaining why judicial reviews will not necessarily stop an individual being
returned or the flight continuing. This is not unusual and is accepted practice by the courts. It remains open for an individual to apply for a high court injunction preventing removal
The one good thing is that previously secret (or at least vigorously obscured) government instructions for similar actions have now been made public.
Labels: coalition government, Deportations, Iraq, Labour
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# posted by : 8:22 am, August 18, 2010
: 8:22 am, August 18, 2010Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Thatcher right and Savage Cuts are clearly the Labour attack mantras to come...
Well I was wondering what Labour was up to on my patch, this being a constituency with a sitting Labour MP and after boundary revision nominally a dead heat with the Tories. To hold on they need to squeeze every vote possible. And this morning a glossy gold card through the door with headline ‘LibDem Leader: Thatcher was right’ and parading a certain remark about ‘savage cuts’. On reverse a bar chart of NATIONAL vote figures and the mantra ‘Only Labour can beat the Tories’.
I suspect ‘Thatcher’ and ‘savage cuts’ will be a drumbeat mantra from the Brown Trousered troops from now until polling day.
A bit late for first Labour activity you might think in this LibDem/Con battleground ward moved from Milton Keynes North-East to Milton Keynes South in the last review, where nobody knows who Enid Starkey MP is at all… But we think Labour spent so much money in wasted preparations for the Election That Never Was that they were too broke up to now to do anything like paying for a household delivery in a key LibDem area.
As I said obviously a nationally produced publication so others will be seeing it on doorstep soon.
Milton Keynes is a strange beast this time round. The Tories won MK Northeast (a gain) and Labour held MK SW in 2005. The boundary revisions mean that just about all pundits thing the new MK North seat is on 2005 figures a nominal Labour one with a sitting Tory MP and the new MK South seat is so close that some rank it as a nominally Conservative seat with a sitting Labour member. The scope for creative bar charts on all sides may just be too tempting!
Any other sightings of this Labour fart?
I suspect ‘Thatcher’ and ‘savage cuts’ will be a drumbeat mantra from the Brown Trousered troops from now until polling day.
A bit late for first Labour activity you might think in this LibDem/Con battleground ward moved from Milton Keynes North-East to Milton Keynes South in the last review, where nobody knows who Enid Starkey MP is at all… But we think Labour spent so much money in wasted preparations for the Election That Never Was that they were too broke up to now to do anything like paying for a household delivery in a key LibDem area.
As I said obviously a nationally produced publication so others will be seeing it on doorstep soon.
Milton Keynes is a strange beast this time round. The Tories won MK Northeast (a gain) and Labour held MK SW in 2005. The boundary revisions mean that just about all pundits thing the new MK North seat is on 2005 figures a nominal Labour one with a sitting Tory MP and the new MK South seat is so close that some rank it as a nominally Conservative seat with a sitting Labour member. The scope for creative bar charts on all sides may just be too tempting!
Any other sightings of this Labour fart?
Labels: general election, Labour, Milton Keynes, squeeze leaflet
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Old Labour roots of compulsory community work idea
The extraordinary tin-ears Labour suggestion to conscript ‘young people’ into a compulsory volunteer workforce is no surprise to those old enough to remember the reality of Old Labour.
Way way back mumble years ago, when the SDP split from Labour and began the long dance to merger with the Liberals the now-defunct journal ‘New Society’ published a study of the attitudes of supporters of each major party to charities and voluntary organisations. As far as I can recall over a quarter-century later it suggested some fundamental differences.
Conservatives, said the article, were often involved in charitable activities, with a bias to fundraising but also for personal-involvement services like the WRVS. They tended to support what they called non-political organisations – defining non-political as not conflicting with Conservative assumptions.
Labour people presented a complex picture. For many, independent voluntary and charitable organisations were a little suspect, even where their aims were supported.
Real work had to be done ‘through Trade Unions’ so there was a parallel structure of ‘Union’ projects shadowing independent initiatives. Where Labour people (especially those with a live commitment to the Labour Party) did become involved in ‘middle-class’ non-Union voluntary activities there was a definite undercover takeover trend. Labour people had to be in control, though an independent façade was useful to suggest support for Labour positions outside that Party.
Of course any voluntarily provided service had to be inferior to a state-provided service and the evolution of society would lead to the withering away f the independent organisations as the State took on its ‘proper role’.
The Liberal Party members and supporters were found to be highly active in voluntary organisations, and to place a value on diversity and empowerment, and exploring different solutions. The article suggested Liberals were less interested in controlling or dominating and more interested in getting jobs done.
And the founding SDP members were found not to be much involved in voluntary organisations at all. (Which was the pot-stirring point of the article at that pre-merger time).
Wonder what a well-structured survey today would find?
I suspect that the instinct to centralise and dominate independent organisations so that their work can be directed into National Ends is part of Labour DNA.
Way way back mumble years ago, when the SDP split from Labour and began the long dance to merger with the Liberals the now-defunct journal ‘New Society’ published a study of the attitudes of supporters of each major party to charities and voluntary organisations. As far as I can recall over a quarter-century later it suggested some fundamental differences.
Conservatives, said the article, were often involved in charitable activities, with a bias to fundraising but also for personal-involvement services like the WRVS. They tended to support what they called non-political organisations – defining non-political as not conflicting with Conservative assumptions.
Labour people presented a complex picture. For many, independent voluntary and charitable organisations were a little suspect, even where their aims were supported.
Real work had to be done ‘through Trade Unions’ so there was a parallel structure of ‘Union’ projects shadowing independent initiatives. Where Labour people (especially those with a live commitment to the Labour Party) did become involved in ‘middle-class’ non-Union voluntary activities there was a definite undercover takeover trend. Labour people had to be in control, though an independent façade was useful to suggest support for Labour positions outside that Party.
Of course any voluntarily provided service had to be inferior to a state-provided service and the evolution of society would lead to the withering away f the independent organisations as the State took on its ‘proper role’.
The Liberal Party members and supporters were found to be highly active in voluntary organisations, and to place a value on diversity and empowerment, and exploring different solutions. The article suggested Liberals were less interested in controlling or dominating and more interested in getting jobs done.
And the founding SDP members were found not to be much involved in voluntary organisations at all. (Which was the pot-stirring point of the article at that pre-merger time).
Wonder what a well-structured survey today would find?
I suspect that the instinct to centralise and dominate independent organisations so that their work can be directed into National Ends is part of Labour DNA.
Labels: community work, Labour, voluntary organisations
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Thursday, June 12, 2008
42 days Pig Hoooo-eeey!
Its Pork time on the banks of the Thames!
Over in the USA getting ‘pork’ (spending of taxpayers funds on local projects) for your district is an essential, even respectable, part of a Congresscritters job. They boast about how many millions they claw back in their re-election literature and if they didn’t bring in the money they would be out.
Members of our blessed Parliament don’t have the same tools as their US counterparts. Here, only a minister of the Crown can introduce a motion instructing how to allocate public funds. And in any case amendments to Westminster legislation have to fall within the scope of the broad purposes of the bill being considered as set out in the preamble. So MPs cannot add ‘riders’ to bills totally irrelevant to the main legislation but bringing localised benefits. In the USA Congersspeople do backstage deals with each other supporting someone else’s pet bit of local influence buying in exchange for support for their own. A million or so in support of a local roads programme inserted into a bill dealing with (say) the teaching or foreign languages to army personnel in exchange for support for the building of a technical school elsewhere would be the sort of thing routinely done in the USA.
But when a Westminster Parliamentary vote is close MPs have an opportunity to get a bit of backroom earmarking. And so it seems to have been with the 42-day detention vote.
P.G.Wodehouse lovers will recall the short story about Lord Emsworth’s pig the Empress of Blandings going off her feed just before the Shropshire Agricultural show. She is induced to eat when a young man with experience raising hogs out in the USA introduces his Lordship to the universal hog-callers cry to bring pigs to the trough.
Pig Hoooo-eeey!
His Lordship is appropriately grateful and backs the romantic liaison between the youth in question and one of his nieces (as I recall…) to the great consternation of the starchy aunts back in the castle.
So for a number of Labour MPs (and the DUP) the appropriate greetings as they wander through Westminster today might be a concerted cry of
Pig Hoooo-eeey!!!!!
Over in the USA getting ‘pork’ (spending of taxpayers funds on local projects) for your district is an essential, even respectable, part of a Congresscritters job. They boast about how many millions they claw back in their re-election literature and if they didn’t bring in the money they would be out.
Members of our blessed Parliament don’t have the same tools as their US counterparts. Here, only a minister of the Crown can introduce a motion instructing how to allocate public funds. And in any case amendments to Westminster legislation have to fall within the scope of the broad purposes of the bill being considered as set out in the preamble. So MPs cannot add ‘riders’ to bills totally irrelevant to the main legislation but bringing localised benefits. In the USA Congersspeople do backstage deals with each other supporting someone else’s pet bit of local influence buying in exchange for support for their own. A million or so in support of a local roads programme inserted into a bill dealing with (say) the teaching or foreign languages to army personnel in exchange for support for the building of a technical school elsewhere would be the sort of thing routinely done in the USA.
But when a Westminster Parliamentary vote is close MPs have an opportunity to get a bit of backroom earmarking. And so it seems to have been with the 42-day detention vote.
P.G.Wodehouse lovers will recall the short story about Lord Emsworth’s pig the Empress of Blandings going off her feed just before the Shropshire Agricultural show. She is induced to eat when a young man with experience raising hogs out in the USA introduces his Lordship to the universal hog-callers cry to bring pigs to the trough.
Pig Hoooo-eeey!
His Lordship is appropriately grateful and backs the romantic liaison between the youth in question and one of his nieces (as I recall…) to the great consternation of the starchy aunts back in the castle.
So for a number of Labour MPs (and the DUP) the appropriate greetings as they wander through Westminster today might be a concerted cry of
Pig Hoooo-eeey!!!!!
Labels: Labour, pork, terrorism
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Friday, April 18, 2008
Dunwoody political memories
The political life of Gwyneth Dunwoody shows how someone can make a mark on the world, and get a deserved memory, without actually climbing to the top of the proverbial greasy pole.
It is to the discredit of the House of Commons that she was not elected to the Speakership at the last contest for that post. Who can doubt that she would have been a much better protector of the rights of ordinary MPs ( and the courtesies due to them) than the present incumbent.
And as she said in 2005, Parliament is the last defender of the rights of all citizens. We really miss having a speaker with that instinctive feel for the constitution.
She and her then husband Dr. John Dunwoody (at one time touted as a future Labour leader) were both elected to Parliament in the 1966 Labour landslide, she for Exeter and he for Falmouth and Cambourne. And thereby hangs a long political tail. John Dunwoody was made a junior minister, partially to dampen his critical backbench activities, and as a consequence was unable to give proper attention to his marginal seat. He probably knew he would lose - at the 1970 general election he failed to attend an important public meeting, sending instead an aide with a tape recording to play to the assembled voters. This rather reduced his standing in Labour circles and the comments on this possibly influenced his decision to withdraw from parliamentary politics, turning down the opportunity to become candidate for Plymouth Devonport. Selected instead, and victorious for Labour in 1974, was another political doctor, one David Owen of diverse later fame.
Gwyneth Dunwoody also lost her West Country seat in 1970, setting up a favourite political pub quiz question on husband and wife MP pairings. She stuck to the political route and in 1974 became the member for Crewe and a long-term thorn in the side of slippery political operators of all persuasions..
My condolences to her family.
It is to the discredit of the House of Commons that she was not elected to the Speakership at the last contest for that post. Who can doubt that she would have been a much better protector of the rights of ordinary MPs ( and the courtesies due to them) than the present incumbent.
And as she said in 2005, Parliament is the last defender of the rights of all citizens. We really miss having a speaker with that instinctive feel for the constitution.
She and her then husband Dr. John Dunwoody (at one time touted as a future Labour leader) were both elected to Parliament in the 1966 Labour landslide, she for Exeter and he for Falmouth and Cambourne. And thereby hangs a long political tail. John Dunwoody was made a junior minister, partially to dampen his critical backbench activities, and as a consequence was unable to give proper attention to his marginal seat. He probably knew he would lose - at the 1970 general election he failed to attend an important public meeting, sending instead an aide with a tape recording to play to the assembled voters. This rather reduced his standing in Labour circles and the comments on this possibly influenced his decision to withdraw from parliamentary politics, turning down the opportunity to become candidate for Plymouth Devonport. Selected instead, and victorious for Labour in 1974, was another political doctor, one David Owen of diverse later fame.
Gwyneth Dunwoody also lost her West Country seat in 1970, setting up a favourite political pub quiz question on husband and wife MP pairings. She stuck to the political route and in 1974 became the member for Crewe and a long-term thorn in the side of slippery political operators of all persuasions..
My condolences to her family.
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
The baleful legacy of Labour in Wales
Simon Jenkins puts his finger on something very important in Welsh politics in this Guardian book review.
That looks a pretty good characterisation of traditional Labour practice in Wales, which basically aimed to marginalise the country to provide reliably Socialist lobby fodder in Westminster to outweigh the Tory bias in England and Scotland. (Older readers will remember a time when the Tories held 40 or so of Scotland’s then-72 Westminster MPs). But of course it wasn’t directed just against ‘Welsh Nationalism’ but also against the local self-help traditions of Wales that nourished Welsh Liberalism.
Jenkin’s aside is one quibble in an otherwise glowing review of ‘The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales’. Jenkins does not mention what the entries for Liberalism are in this work, though presumably there are some, as he notes entries for the Tories. Could some kind LibDem AM or someone on their research staff look up and report on these entries? At £65 a copy (OK £55 on Amazon or even £50 on Amazon if you want the Gwyddoniadur Cymru Yr Academi Gymreig ) it is a bit pricey for me.
A mild leftwing bias renders some entries (in the encyclopaedia) far too gentle. No mention is made of the role of the British Labour party or British trade unionism in stamping on emergent Welsh nationalism in the 20th century.
I am not convinced that the 1979 referendum vote against devolution was against "a national future". It rather reflected the enervation of Welsh politics by generations of Labour leaders, who until 1964 refused Wales even its own secretary of state. This enervation continues in the suppression of Welsh local government, especially in north Wales, by the new Cardiff Assembly.
That looks a pretty good characterisation of traditional Labour practice in Wales, which basically aimed to marginalise the country to provide reliably Socialist lobby fodder in Westminster to outweigh the Tory bias in England and Scotland. (Older readers will remember a time when the Tories held 40 or so of Scotland’s then-72 Westminster MPs). But of course it wasn’t directed just against ‘Welsh Nationalism’ but also against the local self-help traditions of Wales that nourished Welsh Liberalism.
Jenkin’s aside is one quibble in an otherwise glowing review of ‘The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales’. Jenkins does not mention what the entries for Liberalism are in this work, though presumably there are some, as he notes entries for the Tories. Could some kind LibDem AM or someone on their research staff look up and report on these entries? At £65 a copy (OK £55 on Amazon or even £50 on Amazon if you want the Gwyddoniadur Cymru Yr Academi Gymreig ) it is a bit pricey for me.
Labels: Labour, liberalism, Wales
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