May. 16th, 2011

webofevil: (Default)
Some years ago I suggested that Tony Blair was trying to introduce consumer choice where consumer choice just wasn’t wanted or needed.



The coruscating political satire that toppled the Blair administration [1]

Still, I wasn’t prepared for the Tories to come roaring out of the traps with the same idea, only applied to police chiefs. And not just elected police chiefs, an idea already rife with potential pitfalls, but elected along political party lines. Party politics—your guarantee of transparency and fair dealing.

According to former home secretary Lord Howard, whose baby this is, the suggestion will ensure “transparency and accountability”. This would probably carry more weight as a reason if the phrase weren’t already obligatory in politics to get any project at all signed off, from dismantling the civil service to repairing a roundabout[2]). But elected police chiefs is a certified coalition Big Idea, a Tory policy that the Lib Dems are fully signed up to (I saw that twitch, ex-Lib Dem voter! It's time to let it go) so they got to work on it immediately upon taking power, and the result is the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill.

At the heart of the bill is the election of police chiefs and putting the Met under the control of the Mayor of London (police reform), along with other provisions about licensing laws, drugs, arrest warrants and, at last, Parliament Square (social responsibility). It made its way unscathed through the Commons, as bills tend to when the government has complete control over the way the elected House scrutinises and votes on its legislation, and recently made its debut on the floor of the Lords.

The Lords didn’t like the look of it. Anyone with any knowledge of the police, from chairs of police boards to Met ex-commissioners, lined up to denounce the idea of elected commissioners as bafflingly idiotic (I paraphrase, but only just). The intriguing possibilities offered by having non-police in charge of police forces, the precise functioning of relationships between the elected commissioners and the chief constables who would have to remain in charge of actual policing, the chaotic potential of regular four-year political oscillations and many other aspects bothered their Lordships. To all of this the government replied, “We are listening”, which is of course subtle parliamentary code for “We are not listening”.

Wednesday saw the first day of committee stage. As this country works so hard to educate its citizens about the functioning of its own parliament, you of course don’t need me to tell you that committee is the first stage of the actual line-by-line scrutiny of a bill after its general principles have been rehearsed at second reading, but I thought I’d mention it in case any foreigners happened by[3].

The first line in the first clause of the bill read:
1 Police and crime commissioners

1) There is to be a police and crime commissioner for each police area listed in
Schedule 1 to the Police Act 1996 (police areas outside London).
Baroness Harris of Richmond, a veteran Lib Dem and for years the chair of the North Yorkshire Police Authority, had tabled Amendment 1, which read:
Page 1 … leave out subsection (1)
In other words, entirely remove police and crime commissioners from the bill. It could be argued that this ran counter to the spirit of the legislation.

There is a convention that you’re not allowed to table an amendment that could potentially kill a bill stone dead. However, in this case the bill wasn’t just about police chiefs since it contained the social responsibility provisions as well, so her amendment, though still controversial, was permitted. The Lords set to and debated it for the best part of four hours. Then—another convention flouted; you’re generally expected not to vote on amendments in committee since there can be dozens of them, even hundreds, and that would take forever—Baroness Harris pressed it to a vote.

As it became clear during the debate that the bill’s opponents included some rebellious coalition members, including traditionalist Tories appalled at their leadership’s proposed scheme, Nick Clegg is said to have sent his whips around to have urgent words in shell-likes to remind his own troops to vote with the government. On the first anniversary of the coalition it was important that they display unity, even if they might privately find some of the individual policy decisions troubling.



Pictured: coalition.

The result: 188 voted for the amendment, 176 voted against. Thanks to a Lib Dem, police and crime commissioners had been completely removed from the bill, at least for as long as it remained in the Lords. And 13 Lib Dem peers had rebelled, voting against the government’s own proposals, while others had abstained.

Consternation on the government benches. The guts had just been torn out of their bill, leaving only some tattered elements around the edges. Once the bill limps back to the Commons, the first thing they’ll do is vote elected police chiefs straight back into it and the whole rigmarole will start again, with the government forcing it through the Lords with the Parliament Act if necessary, but this defeat was a clear signal of massive opposition and battles ahead. They adjourned the committee in some disarray and the dinner-break debate went ahead a little earlier than scheduled.

When the committee reconvened, the opposition chief whip suggested that they stop proceedings so that the government could take the whole thing away and think again. The government chief whip responded stonily that there were plenty of other things in the bill still to debate, and would everyone please get on with it. This they tried to do, with much confusion about which amendments were still relevant and which were now redundant, while sundry peers kept bobbing up to object to the business proceeding at all. After half an hour of this, the government gave in and adjourned proceedings for 10 minutes, ostensibly to allow discussions among the usual channels—the whips of all parties—but, ever since the shenanigans in January, the two front benches have detested each other and can’t even bothered to be cordial about it, so the chances of communication between them are nil.

When the 10 minutes were up, the government immediately adjourned again for another 10. When they reconvened again, Baroness Royall pointed out from the Labour front bench that no-one had spoken to the opposition. Indeed they hadn’t; the government front bench had seethed and squabbled among themselves for the whole 20-minute hiatus. The result was that the House continued, crossly and pointlessly, to debate the bill. The legislation had, technically, just been transformed beyond recognition but the government have every intention of restoring it and so decided to proceed as if nothing had happened. Their feathers were thoroughly ruffled, though, and their leader can be catty when he’s fractious:
Baroness O’Loan [Cross-Bench, former police ombudsman]: My Lords, if I may speak again, perhaps the Leader of the House could help me by telling me exactly what it is that I am now discussing. I think that I am discussing a police commission comprising a police and crime panel that will elect one of its number to be a police commissioner that has no powers in the Bill, as all the powers in the Bill belong to other organisations. I am mystified as to what I am supposed to be thinking about.

Lord Strathclyde: The noble Baroness is generous in giving me powers, which I do not have, of knowing what it is that she is talking about. [Hansard]
And:
Lord Harris of Haringey: Can the noble Lord the Leader explain to the House why the government Front Bench has permitted us to debate an amendment that potentially no one in this House understands? …

Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, first of all, this will not be the first time that the House has debated an issue that it does not know anything about. [Hansard]
After more confusion and sniping, tempers were pretty frayed all round:
Lord Elystan-Morgan: My Lords, may I make one very small point?

Noble Lords: Sit down! [Hansard]
Some 30 minutes of further debate later—which felt suspiciously like 30 minutes’ detention for an unruly House, since it achieved precisely nothing—the House finally adjourned, with a flagship government bill in tatters and the coalition partners fuming at each other. This isn’t over by any means, and doubtless the government will get its own baffling way on this one as on everything else, but this unexpected spasm of life from the otherwise supine Lib Dems, against the wishes of their leader, might prove to have interesting consequences.


[1] In my defence, some of these weren't too bad.  Back

[2] If Saddam Hussein had had his wits about him and described his invasion of Kuwait as “a move to ensure transparency and accountability”, the UN would probably have just nodded it through. And if he’d gone on to say it was “sustainable”, they’d have given him a sodding grant for it.  Back

[3] I grew up in Britain. I knew very little of our political process, and nothing of the day-to-day functioning of Parliament, until I actually worked there. My sister did learn all about the UK's constituency system and how its bills become acts, but then she grew up in Norway. Back
webofevil: (all hail)
The DWP’s hard work is paying off. Months of dripfeeding negative stories about disabled welfare recipients is translating into a healthy rebalancing of society’s attitudes towards disabilities. It’s time to condemn innocent people a little more and understand medicine a little less:
[In the past year] 37% of people with disabilities claimed they were increasingly being abused in the streets, erroneously reported to the benefits fraud hotline and accosted when trying to use parking spaces for the disabled. Nearly two- thirds thought others did not believe they were disabled and half of respondents said they felt others presumed they did not work. [Guardian]
As with almost all coalition policies, the disability benefit cut and back-to-work efforts are not even remotely designed to save money: as Scope has pointed out, this general atmosphere of hostility towards people with medical conditions means that they will face increased suspicion and outright discrimination when trying to find work, meaning that they are less likely to get it and therefore more likely to become or remain unemployed. But clearly, for the coalition, that’s a small financial price to pay if society finally gets the message about the “disabled”.
webofevil: (Default)
In line with best practice, I will not link to the Daily Mail article that this post is culled from, even though I’m aware that many people’s first instinct will be to visit it immediately to verify that I am not making this stuff up.

A few extracts from Whatever Next?, the memoirs of Earl Ferrers, published this Thursday at £25:
While John Major was Prime Minister, he asked me to go to the Department of the Environment. It had always seemed to me that the department reflected the long-hair and sandals brigade, and tried to protect all the bugs and beetles which I find a menace.

‘The environment’ is the ‘in’ thing. If you are doing something for the environment, that means you are a good person and taking your responsibilities for the planet and the bugs seriously. That is rubbish. The world has been going for hundreds and thousands of years, and one wonders why, in 2011, there is impending disaster. I don’t believe it.

When I got to the department it appeared we had a big issue: the dung beetle. It was one of the animals that it was proposed we should protect. Who on earth wants to protect a dung beetle? Most people don’t know what it is, or what it looks like. If you saw a beetle walking across the kitchen floor, how would you know it was a dung beetle? If you conclude it is a dung beetle, then you must not kill it—or you will have committed an offence. But who is going to know that you have killed the dung beetle? Are they going to shop you to the police? We’ve all gone bonkers.



The Conservative Government introduced the Wildlife And Countryside Bill and part of it was to protect bats. I thought the Government had gone mad.

Lord Melchett was a bumptious young Labour Peer, about 24, who became exasperated with me for some non-sympathetic remarks about bats. He said: “I am sure that what the noble Lord is saying is not the advice of his officials.”

I said: “No. It is from my own experience. If there is one thing which my family cannot stand, it is bats. The girls dive for cover. They are terrified of the bats getting into their hair. The place is mayhem until the bats are removed. And, when it is suggested that the bats have the same right to your house as you have, I just don’t agree.”

It was not the Government line, it was mine—and I lost.



Naturally, with all the travelling and rushing around as a Minister, there were bound to be times when one was caught out. Which I was—by Mrs Thatcher.

When I went with my wife, Annabel, to No 10 for a lunch, I had not had time to look at what we were doing in the House of Lords that afternoon. During the pre-lunch drinks, the Prime Minister said: “Lord Ferrers, what is the House of Lords discussing this afternoon?” Horror of all horrors. I had not the slightest idea—and I was Deputy Leader of the Lords. I was mortified. Back in the House of Lords, I told fellow peer Christopher Soames: “I am in a terrible state.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I have bogged it with the Prime Minister. She asked me what the House of Lords was doing this afternoon and I didn’t know.”

Christopher roared with laughter. “She knew perfectly well. I told her myself this morning.”



At Question Time, if you can score a point or make them all laugh it is very satisfying. The schoolboy ethos is never very far away. When one Minister was at the Despatch Box, I found a drawing pin and placed it on the bench next to me, where the Minister was going to sit. John Belstead, who was Leader, practically had apoplexy. He screamed sotto voce, if one can do such a thing: “No. No. No.” I removed it just in time.
The noble Earl has one or two admiring things to say about women’s appearance, too, which I’m sure will make heartwarming reading for any ladies, although to get the fullest picture it’s also worth noting his publicly stated opinion on their nature as well.

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