Jan 2010 28

A complete and utter disgrace18

It is difficult to write when one is totally incandescent with rage. Indeed it's probably advisable not to. But the news (reported in the Times today) that Harriet Harman and a phalanx of Parliament and democracy hating MPs are to block vital Commons reform, by means of a truly pathetic procedural trick, deserves all the rage and bile I can muster. 

To explain: Back in the summer of last year, at the height of the expenses scandal, Gordon Brown (correctly) acknowledged that the crisis had deep roots. To win back people's trust Parliament had to be reformed, had to be seen to become a genuine legislative chamber again, not a closed theatre for the Government's increasingly morbid psycho-drama.

In establishing a cross-parliamentary committee to explore Commons reform, the Prime Minister no doubt hoped to kick the issue into the long grass. But while in many respects he succeeded (the news cycle moved on, new scandals emerged) appetite for reform remained strong. People want to see change, and not just in the bodies filling the Government benches. Campaigns like Power2010 have sprung up, think tanks have produced reports, MPs have made speeches.

The proposals which eventually came out of the Committee were modest and decades overdue. Select Committees, the organs of Parliament in which the scrutiny of Government is actually done, would be strengthened. No longer would the Chairmen and members be decided over glasses of claret in smoky back rooms, between party whips whose interests are invariably party first, country second. Moreover, backbench MPs, the vast majority of whom do not sit with in Government, would at last get some genuine control over the legislative timetable and procedure. It shouldn't be possible for Government ministers to fiddle things in such a way that bad law gets passed without proper scrutiny, or good law get squeezed out through lack of time.  

It's ironic then that the proposals for Commons reform are to be killed off by the Government's use of procedural trickery.

Harriet Harman, leader of the House of Commons, has never been a fan of reforms that would limit her ability to game the parliamentary system. By declaring that the proposals will be introduced as 'unamendable orders', she has effectively scuppered the hopes of reformers. As an 'unamendable order', a single objection from a single MP prevents the particular measure in question from being passed (the unanimity principle). That measure must be returned to the House at a later date to be debated by a full session of the House, which considering the constraints on parliamentary time (and the fact that the Government controls that time) means that it simply won't come into law. Indeed Harman today gave no assurance that time would be found for those measures that are objected to (see here).

The debate scheduled for February 23rd will therefore be nothing more than parliamentary theatre. All of the measures will be objected to – the Government will make sure of that – and the Committee's proposals (along with the hopes of anyone who wants better government) will be sunk.

Rare are the times when such a small bunch of MPs have so brazenly stuck their middle fingers up at the people of the UK. This move by the leader of the House of Commons (and in the background,
Labour's Chief Whip Nick Brown) should bring the people out onto the
streets. It is the most blatant abuse of the Parliamentary schedule and procedures I can remember, and there have been some crackers in recent years. And the reason? Internal party politics. Harriet Harman is not only the leader of the House, she's also the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and some in the party are having doubts. The need for these reforms has clearly never have been greater.

People do not have to take this lying down though. Harman and Nick Brown both have email addresses, and I encourage you to write. Let them know what you think about their decision to subvert the British parliamentary system for their own ends. Their addresses are below.

Harriet Harman

  • [email protected]
  • [email protected]

Nick Brown (Labour Chief Whip)

  • [email protected]

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  • Steve Robson

    You want to get a life Ben. There must be more important things to be incandescent with rage about than this. What about the suffering that has followed the earthquake in Haiti or the fact that the planet will probably be inhabitable in a hundred years or so’s time. This is the trouble with the Right; you can’t see the wood for the trees and miss the staff that counts. Thats why the tpa focuses on trivia and makes no real contribution to the debate on how to cut the deficit.
    Relax and have a pint…

  • http://profile.typepad.com/rupertmatthews RupertMatthews

    Quite right, Ben. I was pretty irate too. Just one technical point, but shouldn’t that be “stuck up two fingers”? We are British, not American.

  • http://declineofthelogos.wordpress.com Adam Bell

    Speaking as a fully paid-up member of the left, Steve, you’re dead wrong. Using parliamentary procedure to stifle reform is despicable; and using the tragedy in Haiti to downplay it is nearly as despicable too.
    This is stuff that counts. Much as I disagree with the TPA’s politics, you can’t deny that highlighting incompetent spending by public officials is important – every pound wasted is a pound not spent on people who need the services they provide. In a similar fashion, parliamentary reform to increase the power of MPs outside the executive is important, because they can help ensure that the actions of some of the most powerful people in the land are checked and held to account.
    We lend MPs our authority when we vote for them, and by increasing their power we increase our own, too.

  • Steve Robson

    I’m not using the tragedy in Haiti to downplay it, Adam. I am genuinely amazed that people get het up about stuff like this and are not angry at the real inequalities in the world. This bunch of rich public schoolboys (and girls) have never once shown any concern about real poverty and real issues, they just seek to use any excuse to undermine democracy and the public sector purely so the ultra rich who back them can keep even more of their money. Thus they use the MP’s expenses issue as one plank in their campaign which aims to drastically reduce overseas aid, if not abolish it. As a result, someone like David Cameron will get to keep more of his £30million in the bank, while nothing goes to Haiti.
    I didn’t read the stuff about procedures; it was just too boring I’m afraid. Of course, some of the MP expenses claims have been wrong, but the vast majority of it is because it was tacitly allowed instead of more visible pay increases. As for the suggestion that people become MP’s to get rich or because of the short hours, these suggestions are laughable. Almost all MP’s work ridiculously long hours and who’d try to get rich in a job where it takes about ten years or more to get the job in the first place and then you can lose it every four or five years.
    Of course they shouldn’t abuse the system, but its been blown out of all proportion by people with no sense of perspective and/or with sinister agendas, and I repeat there is far more injustice in this world to get incansedcent with rage about.

  • matthew burnham

    Your points would be hard to disagree with Steve except for the incontestable fact that this government has allowed a culture to develop where the law is so darn hard on the rest of us. Witness people whose cars got stuck in the snow and had to pay to have them freed by the authorities. Traffic wardens putting tickets on hearses. 70 pound fine for dropping a fag butt, or feeding the ducks. I am all for flexibility and common sense, and lets face it expenses abuse is widespread in many businesses. But its the moral highground these people take, with their constant, bossy adverts and stern warnings about doing practically ANYTHING, that sets them up to be hated when they do stuff like this.

  • Steve Robson

    You mentioned these type of anecdotes before, but I have never experienced them and know off no-one who has. You say you don’t read the Daily Mail, but they just sound like one off events exagerrated by the Mail or the TPA out of all proportion. So an over-zealous official maybe once put a parking ticket on a hearse, it hardly makes this Nazi Germany or Saudi Arabia does it?
    Its like the TPA’s Jennifer Dunn and her obsession with speeding tickets. She can’t have been driving more than five years if that, but appears to be a great victim of the cameras. I’ve been driving for over 30 and have only ever got one ticket, and I do sometimes break the limit so really deserve more.
    We’re back to the need for a sense of proportion!

  • matthew burnham

    Steve, disregarding personal anecdotes, and having lived in Central London for many years I could come up with plenty, do you not listen, for example, to commercial radio, with all its’ intrusive, big brother type adverts ‘you WILL complete your tax returns’, ‘THINK, its 30 for a REASON’, ‘BENEFIT FRAUD, you WILL be captured’ etc etc. Its the CULTURE that this government has created, its positively ORWELLIAN. I don’t personally break any laws as I am sure you don’t but this government is clearly AUTHORITARIAN in its entire ethos and thats why people get annoyed by their double standards. If you don’t accept this culture exists, then we simply aren’t living in the same country.

  • http://declineofthelogos.wordpress.com Adam Bell

    No-one’s denying that the TPA represent the interests of the better-off, but that’s still no reason to interpret criticising poor spending decisions as an attack on the public sector as a whole. I fear that in your denunciation of procedures as ‘boring’ you’ve rather missed the point: the parliamentary system is the means by which we secure action on poverty, and its integrity has an impact on doing so. If you’re not willing to deal with details like that, how can you possibly have an opinion on a comprehensive equality policy beyond the shallow emotive response of, ‘I don’t like poverty’?
    The TPA has been successful because it’s highlighted ‘details’ which fit into their overall narrative. You’re not going to beat their political agenda until, at the least, you can do the same.
    Also, Matthew, this government is much more Huxlian than Orwellian, if we’re breaking out the totalitarian labels.

  • great grannie

    think that harman woman who wants to play class wars is two faced she wants to feather her nest yet crack down on others what can we expect from such a corrupt lot as this labour mafia . never ever again vote labour

  • David Charnley

    And while all this goes on, Tory Boy Dave and ‘all things to all men’ Clegg keep silent. This isn’t a party political issue (bash labour all you like). It’s a democracy issue. There isn’t one MP in that house of horrors who would welcome any change to the cosy undemocratic parliamentary closed shop. They may all be turkeys, but they won’t be voting for the festive season!

  • http://www.crazyrev.blogspot.com C.B.Ross

    Steve @06.24 am. Is it not possible to be angry at two (or even more!) situations simultaneously?! Just because one abhors the devious behaviour of the Harperson person does not automatically mean that one doesn’t care about the dreadful situation in Haiti!

  • V Taylor

    Steve – if you can’t get angry about the disgraceful ways that MP’s have fleeced the taxpayers, then what are you going on a Taxpayers Alliance site?
    Isn’t there a site somewhere about the Haiti earthquake where you can beat your breast and say how unfair it is that God or Mother Nature would inflict such a disaster on the Haitian people?

  • Kevin Moss

    Steve’s objections to the focus of Ben’s article ignores a critical truth. This particular government has been the exponent, par excellence, or attacking ‘big issues’ through the steady, drip, drip, drip accretion of ‘small’ initiatives that Steve would apparently regard as too insignificant to appear on his radar.
    The big battles are lost through our inattention during the smaller skirmishes. The value and importance of democracy is, when contrasted with other political systems, a ‘big battle’. New Labour is sequentially weakening it, whilst at the same time eroding value systems which underpinned our democracy.

  • Steve Flanigan

    Nick Brown was the demented disgrace in 2001 when the foul clouds were swirling their stench round my Uncle’s home outside of Penrith. Labour had not the courage or itelligence to see his incompetence. All he has been fit for is wiping bottoms, on which note I end before I get prosecuted for homophobia..

  • Roy Stenning

    When will our current politicians grow up. There are very many serious issues in the country to discuss and take action on, so could we stop the `ya-boo’ attitudes so prevalent in the Commons and attend to them in a common sense manner and not as party one-upmanship matters.

  • robin winston-smythe

    harriet harman is a hapless,hopeless,humungus,harridan,humourless,harpie,horrendous,of herne hill.
    what these troughiteers are doing in the once honourable labour party is why i do not vote labour of any of the eu-loving establishment parties leb-dim or tory.
    only voting Independent or UKIP makes sense,i dislike corporate fascism,Kraft etc or bnp fascism

  • Terence Griffin

    After a fairly promising start (ie consensual government) Blair allowed his old labour chancellor to set the agenda for a decade of stealth taxes. Bamboozled by spin and misinformation and the failure of the official opposition to get its house in order, the electorate furnished Labour with three election victories. The imperceptible drift to the left of the first ten years has become a raging torrent under Brown and the class warriors whom Blair and his bulldog Prescott managed to keep in check for so long.
    Harriet Harman is the outward and visible sign of a resurgent Left (New Old Labour?) more frightening to us ordinary mortals than Boadicea must have appeared to the Romans.

  • Roy H

    “What goes around comes around”. Be patient folks !.