Gord Help Us

I was sitting with cold beer looking up at at Mont Blanc, not thinking about Gordon on holiday in Suffolk, when I got the text from my brother. Labour had lost the by-election in Glasgow to the SNP. Just ten days before, I saw two polls which showed a 12-14% point Labour lead which would translate into a much reduced majority of 4-5,000 but a safe win. So I had put the prospect of Government defeat out of my mind.
The loss easily ranks with other by-election disasters for a sitting Government, Orpington, Bermondsey, Govan, Newbury for those political anoraks.
It was a colosall political error for Brown to call the election in July. His idea was to get it out of the way ready for a re-launch in October. But what he failed to realise was how far the mo' (that's American for momentum) was against him. It was also extra-ordinarily foolish to reveal, a week before polling. a new Tory style strategy on benefit scroungers instituting a US welfare to work scheme and forcing the disabled into work. Glasgow East is one of the poorest seats in UK with very high levels of state dependence, how did they expect it to play?
It is as well for Gordon everyone is still on the beach but they'll be back by 1 September and then he can expect huge speculation about his future. He may be about as popular as rabies but his Prime Ministerialship is not immediately threatened. He is clearly not one of those resigning types, particularly as he doesn't feel he's got anything wrong.

Party rules on unseating a leader are really tough, about half the delegates at the Manchester Conference in October would have to vote against him in a no-confidence motion. I can't see that happening especially as there is no very obvious successor although David Milliband and Alan Johnson would probably make a better fist of it than Gordon.
Labour MPs are also aware a new leader would bring a General Election and for many joining the queue of scroungers in the search for work. It may be the case constitutionally there is no requirement to hold an election simply because the ruling party have elected a new leader. But the public would not accept three Labour PMs in 18 months without a re-newing its mandate.
Gordon was of course chillin' with his homies in Southwold in the August drizzle. He looked even stiffer than John Major which I didn't think was possible. Who wears a jacket and patent leather shoes on the beach? Cameron as Boden man in bordies and a polo shirt made Gord look like he was from another era. There's a reason for that. He is.

More conviction needed. Less convictions

Jacqui Smith made Home Secretary without first running a large Department which is unlike pretty much any Home Sec in history. In fact her previous post of Chief Whip usually excludes the holder from taking a large portfolio. Her inexperience certainly shows. Her first blunder was to suck up to the Treasury over a paltry £40m police wage increase. As Gerald Kaufman said in his well-regarded book 'How to be a Minister' - Lesson number one - defend your Department.

Of course, Jacqui lost a huge amount of responsibility (prisons, probation, ) to the new Justice Ministry and immigration is now an arms-length style agency. But she still holds the youth offending file and although all measures of crime are showing significant falls there has been a recent hysterical response to young people.

In the east police are being advised to openly follow, film and harrass young people. Check out the copper in this film.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7518506.stm.

Jacqui said this," I want police to focus on them by giving them a taste of their own medicine: daily visits, repeated warnings and relentless filming of offenders to create an environment where there is nowhere to hide." This policy, if you can call it that, may satisfy some inner neurotic desire to shackle young wide boys but doesn't say a lot about her knowledge of human behaviour. The young thug is hardly going to be persuaded to lead a more constructive life by being bullied by a few half-witted woodentops.

This weekend she was at it again advising the general public to have-a-go when they see a crime taking place. Boris Johnson took a different view when he said, "don't get involved, move away." It is another compelling sympton of Labour's terminal decline that 'Bonkers' Johnson has got a better grip of issues such as street crime than the Home Secretary.

Norfolk's Tony Martin was held up as a hero defending his property. But when the detail of his case emerged he didn't come out as noble or valiant but somewhat deluded. Apparently he would lie in bed fully clothed with a shotgun beside him. When Martin murdered that 16 year old burglar he was running away terrified and was shot in the back. That is not the proportionate action of a brave man. But Jacqui would not agree.

The Rewards of Loyalty: Deportation

The redoubtable Bob Russell (Colchester) yesterday continued, along with his Party Leader Nick Clegg, to apply pressure on the Government over their shameful treatment of the Gurkhas. The MOD finally backed down last year over equal pension rights after a protracted legal battle. But another High Court battle is beginning over retired Gurkha soldiers' right to remain in UK as they have just been granted a Judicial Review.

Any Gurkha who joined the British army post-1997 and has served four years will be granted British citizenship and it would be reasonable to assume that was well deserved after sorties in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. For those who joined before that arbitrary debate, there is no similar dispensation. The 2,000 or so mainly retired soldiers face deportation to Nepal. When they marched on Parliament just before Easter, Gordon Brown even refused a meeting with representatives (who is advising the man?) Even the image of these war heroes handing back their medals by the dozen apparently leaves Ministers unmoved.

These extra-ordinary stern, if not pernicious immigration rules are far from the exception. Gord last week tried to appear magnanimous by announcing a moratorium on returning failed asylum seekers back to Zimbabwe. Leaving the substantial moral issues to one side, deportations would be practically rather difficult as Gord has proposed sanctions to cease all Zimbabwean Airways flights in the EU and no British airline flies to Harare anymore.

These 11,000 Zimbabweans, now in limbo, are not entitled to benefits nor are they legally allowed to work. There is no advice from the Home Office on how they should stay alive in the meantime but clearly working illegally is their only option. Britain has a long (and once proud) tradition of accepting oppressed and terrorised groups from the European Jews of the 1930s to the Ugandan Asians in the 1970s. Their acceptance was combined with an expectation they would "stand on their own two feet." Immigration policy now outlaws that. And in the case of the Gurkhas long service to the country is rewarded with a couple of ribbons and a kick up the arse out of the country.

Labour Determined to Lose the Middle Ground

To Treasury questions in the Commons. There are two kinds of tax the public particularly detest. The first are flat-rate taxes where the burden is equal regardless of ability to pay. The other, which has the potential to turn this otherwise mild nation into a seething mob, are retrospective taxes. Here, only the gift of clairvoyancy could provide the public with enough information to avoid paying the tax.
The new ‘green’ increases to Vehicle Excise Duty certainly fall into that second category. If the Daily Telegraph is to be believed there will be increases for over 9 million drivers.
Senior Treasury officials should have advised Ministers the increases, following huge rises in petrol prices, would not be perceived as ‘green’ and acceptable but simply unfair and revenue-raising. This policy would be hard enough to push through in good times (see Labour Govts 1997-2005) but with current polls almost below sea-level, it looks like electoral suicide.
Angela Eagle was first Treasury Minister to make a stab at the defence. Treasury Questions sound a lot like Environment Questions these days; all the talk was of "global emissions", "oil dependency" and "eco-innovation". Ange, who was so completely and utterly sacked by Tony Blair, has regained some composure since she was allowed to be a Minister again. (She was totally ineffective at the Home Office where she tried to give the impression of impervious self-certainty by playing ‘Mini-me’ to the arrogant Blunkett.)
Next up to the Dispatch Box was the slinky Yvette Cooper who is a highly confident performer. If it rankles that others less able have been promoted to Cabinet ahead of her, it doesn’t show. She is certainly eons more entertaining than ‘Badger’ Darling whose turgid delivery almost bored the Opposition into submission. The Chancellor was helped along by a host of pliant and supine Labour backbenchers who each painted a picture of the last 11 years as nothing short of an economic Shangri-la. It was left to wealthy Conservative members to raise concerns about the impact of various tax policies on low-income families. Ministers couldn't even guess which income groups would be most effected by VED changes.
The session certainly came alive, just briefly, when Dennis Skinner jumped up to champion the successful job creation programmes in his constituency (Bolsover). The Treasury team all smiled nervously as Dennis’s Derbyshire tones boomed around the chamber, but eventually their static grins slowly began to fall. His contribution was received like an impromptu wedding speech by a well-meaning but thoroughly pissed uncle.
Finally we got to the real business of VED increases. George Osbourne, with a delivery which can be described as sneering conceit actually summarised the Government’s position most accurately when he said they were “sleepwalking into another 10p tax fiasco.”
There appears to be no shift in the offing, no indication of a more flexible approach. Labour MPs took it all glumly and with abject resignation - it was like they were listening to the forecast of another washed-out Bank Holiday.

Amess Still Needs the Buzz

This week David Amess MP (Southend West) put down no less than eight Parliamentary Questions about bees, beekeeping and the general health and well-being of the nation's bees. No, seriously, he did. I thought at first, Mr Amess was trying to smash all records for asking the most PQs but he has already asked over 4,000 since 1987 and I suspect he already is Parliament's no.1 questioner. One can only assume a worried constituent came recently to his Friday surgery with compelling evidence of impending honey shortages and the associated depletion of the Britain's treasured hives.

The poor Minister replying, Jonathan Shaw, Parly Under Sec at DEFRA, tried to maintain a serious front and poured forth about the Government' s comprehensive Bee Health Strategy and paid fitting tribute to the tireless efforts of the Bee Inspectorate from the National Bee Unit. (This sounds just like the start of a Monty Python sketch, doesn't it? It is not very hard to picture Graham Chapman in the office of the National Bee Unit, wearing a huge bee costume, getting jolly batey about pollen. And still smoking a pipe.)

Mr Shaw referred constantly to the guiding legislation, which we all know is the Bees Act 1980. It turns out the relevant provisions include some pretty protectionist measures taken in the early days of Queen Bee herself, Margaret Thatcher. At the time, there were, presumably, plenty of Conservative backbenchers calling for an altogether more free-market solution to the bee conundrum - 'deregulate the keepers, privatise the hives' the call.

More reassuring for law and order hardliners, the Bees Act does provide (I'm not joking) the police with sweeping powers of entry to any abode or vehicle which may contain even a single outlawed foreign bee. You may ask how the ordinary copper would be able to recognise the alien bee - one assumes every police force in those days had its own Insect Squad.

It is somewhat worrying, the Bees Act itself was passed almost immediately after the release of several killer bee films most notably 'The Swarm'. Michael Caine as the rogue-doesn't-play-by-the-rules entomologist perfectly captured the tension between man and bee when he said, "We've been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years, but I never thought I'd see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees - they've always been our friends!"

Odds On for Ratification

The spread-betting magnate Stuart Wheeler (pictured) has just lost his case in the High Court which aimed to compel the Government to hold to its manifesto commitment and have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. The EU (Amendment) Act got Royal Assent on 19 June but has the case held up its commencement until now. There is also the small matter of the Irish voting pretty solidly (53.4% to 46.6%) against the Treaty. In theory the 'Dublin says no' vote should mean the Treaty has been holed below the water line. However the Government remain pretty tight-lipped not wanting to be the first country to admit the 'bleeding obvious' that the rest of the EU will gang up on the Taiseoch, Brian Cowen and mak them vote again until they get it right. Our local MP Bernard Jenkin (North Essex) made this exact same point after Foreign Sec's statement last week. None of this sits terribly well with Yurp lecturing Zimbabwe, China and Burma about our superior democratic principles.

In any case people prefer to vote no on these matters. Even Euro stalwarts Holland and France gave the last Treaty the finger. The electorate will find any tangential issue as an excuse, apparently in Ireland up to 10% of the 'no vote' were motivated by scare stories of Brussels forcing a change of law to allow abortions. Utter twaddle of course. A referendum in UK would be bring out every headbanger sceptic in some vast unholy alliance of loons and conspiracy theorists. Nevertheless the back rooming dealing by the euro leaders seemingly overriding the will of the people simply re-enforces the view it is a self-serving organisation for the political elite.

The Art of Resigning

Our local man, Bob Spink (Castlepoint) resigned from the Conservative Party during the Budget but still only made only a ripple of news. He elected to join UKIP but what else could he do? Resign his seat as well? David Davis (above) has made the curious and almost unprecedented decision to resign his seat in response to the opposition's defeat over 42 day's detention. He wants to stimulate a national debate about authoritarianism over libertarianism. Or so he says. The resignation speech was delivered outside Westminster's St. Stephen's entrance as Mr Speaker had ruled (perversely) it would 'revisit controversial issues' - so what if it did?

The speech included a long litany of Labour Government's "relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms (sic)". It read like a fairly convincing string of rationalisations, cleverly obscuring the underlying motivation. One suspects the spark was Davis's stated commitment to repeal the 42-day detention legislation. It would appear Cameron, as ever, was not willing to be explicit about his Party's future legislative programme. Davis, frustrated by his impotence, took the only action he was able by petulantly resigning his seat. It's like the child at teatime who in a fit of temper declares he is not going to eat his tea. In other words Davis is the only likely loser in this. The early predictions were for him to win very easily or even have a walkover. History suggests he will lose, the public in Humberside may like his 'no nonsense-speak-as-I-find' approach but the electorate don't like voting unless there's a good reason. At present only Kelvin 'Page 3' MacKenzie is considering running but any high profile Independent could slay Davis.