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.

Tags: Agent Orange, Duncan Borrowman, Ros Scott, Sleaze

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”.

Tags: Gordon Brown

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.

Tags: censorship, VRA