Liberal Vision

When not all sleaze is created equal…

In a recent post Agent Orange stated that “All it takes is for good people to do nothing…” where he challenged FedEx member and PPC, Duncan Borrowman, to apply his rigorous condemnation of sleaze to his own party:

How about you Duncan Borrowman, you’re a member of the Federal Executive and an active anti-sleaze campaigner. What have you done to ensure our Party is protected from association with alleged criminals and that they are properly investigated?

Agent Orange then sent a follow up email where Duncan swiftly replied that he didn’t respond to individuals “who hide behind aliases…” Agent Orange also forwarded him the planned follow up post where he intended to call Borrowman a hypocrite.In a bizarre post on his own blog Borrowman reprinted Agent Orange’s planned post with a rather disheartening justification of his behaviour:

For the record, my answers are:
1. I am a Liberal Democrat. My public pronouncements on the failings of politicians will always be about my political opponents, not those in the same party as me.
2. Anything I may do internally in the party will remain internal, and confidential. Whatever the issue.
End of story. (P.S. None of his “occasional couriers at Liberal Vision” has been in touch with me, and I am not sure I would give them the time of day if they did!)

The last point is certainly not for lack of trying; here is a screencap of the letter that I sent on the 25th August :

The email must have bounced or something…

Agent Orange then followed up:

It’s not the response I hoped for; Duncan has said whilst attacking others,  he will refuse to comment on or condemn sleaze by Liberal Democrats. This is the kind of tribal hypocrisy that drives members of the public mad and I think he’s wrong to take that stance.

Sleaze is sleaze. it is not unique to any party but how parties deal with it is important, and surely the best way forward is for parties to get their own houses in order to ensure people don’t fall into the trap of believing the only crime is to get caught?

The peers in question should be properly investigated internally, and if their answers are not satisfactory they should be expelled for disrepute. We should also assist Parliament and the Police with their inquiries, not engage in cover-ups.

He has also said that anything internal to the Liberal Democrats will remain internal and confidential, which is fair enough, only the Liberal Democrat response to peergate is already public, and clearly inadequate.

One has to feel sorry for the constituents of Old Bexley and Sidcup tonight - they’ve have an MP disgraced over a sleaze row and now they have a PPC that will only fight sleaze selectively.

Scarlett’s Seven on Sunday - 30th August 2009

Hello lovelies, welcome to Miss Scarlett’s Sunday blog emporium. What we’re going to do today is this morning I’ll be posting four articles from across the week - and this afternoon we’ll have a look at the to-and-fro between Agent Orange and Duncan Borrowman.

Ollie Cromwell over at the Red Rag is not impressed with Sarah Teather this week: “Housing benefit should be just that and nothing more. However, under changes implemented by this government in 2008 new housing benefit claimants have been entitled to get up to £15 a week back if they find accommodation at a lower rent than the level of housing allowance set by their local authority. So far 300,000 people have latched onto this scam and are claiming back up to £780 per year for rent they have not paid. That is up to one quarter of a billion pounds of YOUR money!

So basically if you are on benefits find yourself a cheaper flat and the taxpayer will buy your beer and fags for you. Not surprisingly now the coffers are empty the government is looking at closing this insane redistribution of wealth from hard working families to the benefits culture recipients.”

A few tactical musings from Political Betting: “… A total of 56% of Lib Dems voters said they would rather see the Tories in power, against 36% who want Labour.

The critical thing here is what these voters do in specific seats when they are fully appraised of local electoral situations. If enough of them vote tactically for the Tories then Labour will suffer disproportionate losses on top of the swing predictions.”

Iain Dale’s reaction to Irfan Ahmed’s suggestion that President Obama should meet Nick Clegg: President of Pakistan meets Nick Clegg. President of Pakistan is important person. Obama is important person too. Ergo, he should hold talks with Nick Clegg. Only right, innit?

ROFL and LMAO all in one.

And Daniel Hannan concurs that hackery will get us nowhere: For most of our history, it was understood that MPs sat in their own right and were answerable chiefly to their local electorate. This meant that, in order to get their programme through, ministers had to humour and cajole the House of Commons, which in turn meant that the legislature was an effective check on the executive. True, all members of the Cabinet were bound by collective responsibility. But the notion that such responsibility should extend to their backbenchers would have seemed outrageous: the whole purpose of Parliament was to hold the administration to account.

And if you’ve seen any posts you think should feature on “Scarlett’s Seven on Sunday” - then send me the link at sara.scarlett@liberal-vision.org. I’m not looking for “the best” posts but anything eclectic which may go under the radar otherwise. It’s not a bad way to get your Wikio rankings up - nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Have a lovely week my honeys…!!

Clegg continues march to classical liberalism

Nick Clegg’s (woefully under-reported) initiative in seeking to save taxpayers’ money is yet further evidence that the LibDem leader is taking the party in the right direction.

Thousands of party members will have received a plea for advice from public sector workers on how savings can be made from bloated, excessive and increasingly unaffordable departmental budgets. Nick is honest and up front - money is going to be tight for years, if not decades. Without dramatic cuts in some areas, other services will falter and/or taxes will rise yet further.

But I wish that the consultation had also been directed at the private citizens who use public services, not just the staff who work in them. Customers and consumers are often a better guide to where products and services are going wrong than employees, who obviously have an interest in emphasising their own vital role in whatever-it-is-they-do.

We also need to ensure we don’t buy the “waste myth”. Yes, there is monumental waste in the public sector, but there’s not much reason to believe a government of a different political colour will be successful at weeding it out. Only limited savings can be made by finding cheaper wholesale suppliers of paperclips.

What we need to do is admit that we’ll completely eliminate whole swathes of low priority projects.

I have no doubt that many public sector workers will bemoan the huge amounts of money frittered away on failed IT systems - especially if they are asked to withstand a wage freeze. Fair enough.

But how many public sector workers are going to say “The whole project I’m working on is just not worth the candle. We chew up large amounts of taxpayers’ cash for very limited output.  To be honest, you should sack the lot of us and close the whole thing down. Don’t trim us, don’t audit us, don’t set new targets for us. Just kill us off.”

Not many, I’d guess.

Gordon Brown: The Macavity Prime Minister

Readers may recall former permanent secretary Lord Turnbull comparing Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to T.S. Eliot’s Macavity back in 2007. After a couple of years at the helm, Brown has certainly proved that he’s the Prime Minister who isn’t there. Here’s Liberal Vision’s “tribute”.

Enjoy your ninety days of porn and violence

The legislative screw-up surrounding the Video Recordings Act (they forgot to send the European Commission a copy), opens a narrow window (about three months before the government “sorts everything out”) of cinematic freedom.  We should be able to measure whether there is an enormous upswing in violence, rape and murder in that time. Or whether there isn’t.

As Julian Petley points out in the Guardian, the overwhelming bulk of the censorship work in Britain is to prevent adults seeing things. In 2007, the BBFC made cuts to 25% of the films in the 18 and R18 categories.

Fans of Quentin Tarantino’s sublime Reservoir Dogs, might recall that it took two years for a video release to be sanctioned (the fact that Tarantino himself was delighted, because it allowed repeat viewings at cinemas, is hardly the point!)

This enormous Whitehall cock-up provides an opportunity to properly liberalise the censorship regime that exists in this country. But don’t expect our politicians to seize it. Far better to engage in whipping up some moral panic and to drone on relentlessly about child protection.

What do you get if you put a dictator, a movie mogul and Lord Mandelson in the same room?

Answer: Pretty much anything they want - it would seem.

The latest loony suggestion from the Government, announced today, is to FORCE Internet Service Providers to suspend access to those internet users who illegally download music and films.

It’s a stupid suggestion - forcing ISPs to take action on offenders. If piracy is illegal its surely a police matter - not a matter for business. And who exactly is going to police the ISPs to ensure that they do as instructed, another quango? And in any event who’s to say that those most adept at piracy will not be able to evade ths ISPs ( i dont know how but I’m sure they do). All we are likely to see are the occassional offenders and the inept being caught in this particular trap. Wrong.Wrong.Wrong.

And talking of wrong..  How long can the unelected Business Secretary be allowed treat this country as his own personal fiefdom? He returns to the scene of last years crime (yachts, Russians, George Osborne) to holiday with the Rothschilds. He meets Gaddaffi’s son, and within days the whole Libyan bomber fiasco unfolds. On the same holiday he meets the billionaire producer David Geffen (who co-founded Dreamworks with Steven Speilberg) and before his Corfu tan has faded his department is announcing a major u-turn on illegal downloads.

Hollywood film companies are reportedly losing hundreds of millions of pounds from illegal downloads, and have launched a very active lobbying operation to change the law to make it harder. Coincidence?

Well I for one can imagine the conversation that Lord Rothschild has with his mates… “Fancy a few days in Corfu Mr Geffen? ” ….”No thanks Roths,bit busy”… “Did I mention that Nat is bringing along Mandy from the UK?” …” Really? Shall we say Friday 6pm - I’ll come in the yacht - no need to make up the beds”.

I am sure that the unelected Business Secretary will produce some sneary response and call any suggestion of a link between the meeting and the u-turn on policy as “insulting” “absurd” or some such thing.

But we will remember that he’s said all that before and not once but twice has been forced to quit from UK office (you remember the undisclosed home loan from Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson and the Hinduja passport affair). So here’s hoping his arrogance does for him again. In the meantime it will be well-worth watching where he spends his Christmas break. Ski-ing anyone?

Police to focus strategy on winning over the Tories

An internal report released by the Metropolitan Police under Freedom of Information laws has revealed that  fewer than one crime is solved by every 1,000 closed circuit television cameras per year. Thats a lot of cameras for not very much.

And yes its a pretty shocking waste of money that could have been spent better elsewhere (or better still been in our own pockets). And yes we are way too spied upon, with 1% of the world population and 20% of all cctvs. And yes its laughable that the Home Office have defended the use of CCTV’s, saying cameras could “help communities feel safer”…… But in reality that’s old, if still troubling, news.

What worried me was the part under a section headlined “Strategic Issues”, where it said: “Potential change of Government - the Conservatives are not CCTV friendly - we need to start showing that we are targeting serious crime.”

 So if I get a knife put to my face in the street this evening - that somehow the nine cctvs on my 4 minute walk to the newsagent miss - are the police going to take it even less seriously than they did last time (and trust me that would be pretty difficult even for them)? Answer would appear to be, yes. 

Depressingly here we have another organisation that is clearly intending to spend the next 9 months focusing on ways to “meet targets” and win over politicians, rather than get on with the job of policing the streets and solving crime. Call me old-fashioned but I liked it when the BBC did good tv programmes, doctors did medicine and police did crime-prevention. I dont see how any of them have the time to do their day job if they are all going to be spending  the next nine months trying to second guess what the next Government (most likely a Tory one according to the Met police you’ll note) wants.

Tighten your seatbelts, its going to be a bumpy ride! Oh and be careful when you’re out and about on the streets - and if you do become a victim of crime, best make sure its a “serious” one if you want anything done about it.

Vince Cable’s moral compass

It is said that you can judge a person by the company they keep. In that case, Vince Cable’s halo has slipped a bit.

His decision to give his support to Compass in its campaign for a High Pay Commission to curb “excessive” pay is bad politically, economically and morally.

Compass is an avowedly socialist campaign group, the primary focus of which is the Labour Party. It is a partisan body that has for some time sought to make Labour even more interventionist, statist and illiberal. Vince Cable should not be giving it intellectual succour.

In addition, the very idea that the government should impose maximum wages upon individuals should be anathema to him both as a liberal and as an economist.

I have written an article on the Institute of Economic Affairs blog explaining some reasons why maximum wage legislation is a bad idea. On the one hand, “There is no reason, functionally or morally, why a person should not enjoy any amount of wealth”. On the other, free economies have a far better reputation for wealth creation, poverty alleviation and even wealth distribution than interventionist ones. So maximum wage legislation is unfair both on an individual and a community-wide basis.

On top of this, Vince’s reason for supporting the High Pay Commission is flawed. In his words “There is no justification for massive pay and bonus awards in financial institutions, the most important of which are guaranteed or owned or have been rescued by the tax payer. Transparency and tax are important but a High Pay Commission looking at both equity and economic aspects is a welcome suggestion too.”

Firstly, the justification for “massive pay and bonus awards in financial institutions” is the same as it always was: it is necessary to attract the best talent. That the industry spectacularly failed in 2007 does not mean that there is no need to chase talent in 2009. What was wrong with the bonus culture in 2007 (and before, and indeed since) was not the size of the bonuses but the behaviour for which they were being paid. Had Compass proposed a Short-Term Gain Bonus Commission they might be on to something, but that is not what they are proposing. In attacking the size of the bonus rather than the behaviour they are rewarding, Compass is off the mark.

It is also not true that “the most important” financial institutions “are guaranteed or owned or have been rescued by the tax payer”, unless he is referring to the Bank of England’s lender of last resort function, which is centuries old and has been exercised without the need for maximum wage legislation for all that time. Only some financial institutions are actually owned by the taxpayer; Barclays and HSBC did not require a bailout and should not be subject to interference. Indeed, Lloyds TSB would be in a far better state had the government not effectively strong-armed it into merging with the bankrupt HBOS.

Of course, the government should not have a stake in the banks. Even if a bailout was necessary it should be reversed as soon as possible. But while the government does own shares in the banks it has a duty to taxpayers to get the best return on its investment. This will require the best talent available in the industry, which means that state-owned banks will need to compete with the rest of the sector by offering pay and bonuses commensurate with market rates. In fact, one cannot escape the feeling that the idea of limiting pay in the private sector is just a means of keeping down the costs to state-owned industries; a case of government being forced to intervene further to address the consequences of its past interventions.

His final point is the one I have discussed at in my IEA blog posting. The “equity and economic aspects” of government intervention are far more harmful to the poor than are the effects of leaving people alone. Free societies are not only fairer than less free ones, with the poorest owning a larger proportion of the nation’s wealth than in more interventionist economies, but they also create more wealth, so that the poor enjoy vastly more absolute wealth in free economies than in command economies.

Maximum wage legislation is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea for the Liberal Democrat’s shadow chancellor to support the socialist wing of the Labour party.

MacKaskill : a man out of his depth

The decision to release the convicted Libyan bomber was botched from start to end. Lets ignore for a moment the unelected Business Secretary’s involvement in the process.

1. Why did MacKaskill - the Scottish Justice Secretary - feel the need to MEET the convicted bomber ? There was no need. Representations could and should have been made in writing without the need to actually go and have a chat with the man.

2. Why did the bomber drop his appeal immediately following that meeting ? What was said at that meeting that led to that extraordinary decision? Under Scots law, dropping an appeal is not a necessary precondition of compassionate release.

3. Why was the decision released to the media BEFORE the relatives of the victims or the Scottish parliament were told?

All round this was handled about as ineptly as it could have been. Why? My suspicion is because it did involve business deals with Libya, pressure from the Business Secretary and the Prime Minister, and the desire for the appeal not to be heard (quite possibly where failings in the original trial would be highlighted). That led to hurried and poor decisions being made. Overall, I am afraid this speaks of (yet another) senior official,when really tested, just not being up to the job.

The Scottish parliament meet this afternoon in an emergency session. I doubt that anything satisfactory will come out of the emergency debate. But will watch with interest.

I hope that the Lib Dems will continue to put pressure on the Prime Minister to be questioned on this. Why parliament is in recess for so long - when important issues of state go unexamined and unexplained - is beyond me.

Gordon Brown : a man with no sense of priorities

Gordon Brown has been under pressure, for several days now, to say something about the release of the convicted Libyan bomber, Abdulbaset al-Megrahi.

And rightly so. After all Colonel Gaddaffi has gone public thanking “his friend” Gordon Brown for the release of al Megrahi. And Gaddffi’s son has made it clear that the convicted bomber was always part of Libya’s discussions with Britain on oil and other trade. But to date, nothing from our Prime Minister.

Last night I was listening to the radio five live news (Sunday 2230) and I hear that Downing Street are describing the England Ashes victory as ”exhilarating”  and that “Gordon Brown will be writing to the captain Andrew Strauss to congratulate the team”.

Can someone tell me how it can be construed as, in anyway, appropriate to maintain radio silence on the release of Megrahi, yet come out promptly to comment on a game of cricket?