I was surprised by the matter-of-fact manner in which the BBC announced Harriet Harman as deputy leader of the Labour Party. I genuinely expected a Pop Idol style build up, with the camera flitting between Johnson, Benn, Blears and the rest… before Ant or Dec or Fearn shouts the winner to fireworks and a shreiking audience.
Tag: New Labour (Page 3 of 4)
In the absence of the stalwarty DoctorVee, I have edited this week’s Scottish Roundup. I actually found trawling through loads of politicians’ blogs quite encouraging. People have a genuine passion for making things better (although of course, they all have a slightly different conception of how that might be achieved). Yes yes, I know “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”… but so is the forked path to progress and prosperity.
I included in the round-up a post from Rhetorically Speaking, about the fact that the Executive have legislated in favour of women being allowed to breastfeed in public. Much has been made recently of Labour’s frenzied approach to law-making, with apparently a new law being made every three hours since they came to power. I wonder how many of these were laws that affirmed a citizen’s rights, as opposed to laws which took rights away?
Update
Just spotted a post from Tim Worstall on the issue. There are some pertinent points in the comments. My favourite is from Little Black Sambo:
This is entirely consistent with the new understanding of law. The purpose of making a law is to “send a message”.
It seems a couple of rather illiberal policies seem to have found their way into the Scottish Labour Party campaign.
The first, which is part of the manifesto, is to “retain the DNA samples of all crime suspects“.
A common argument from civil liberties campaigners is that such a policy effectively makes people into permenant crimminal suspects. However, I am not so sure that this would blight your outlook, in the same way that young ‘hoodies’ become demoralised by the feeling that they are always under suspicion. Or does the hidden nature of the suspicion make it more sinister? Either way, more worrying is the possibility that the DNA database could be comprimised: either accidentally, in which case a ‘false positive’ result could convict an innocent person of a crime they did not commit; or on purpose, with a person being framed for monetary or political gain.
One reason why our laws have been structured as they are, is to protect innocent people from mistakes, maladministration and malign intent. The careful procedures for the collection (and then destruction) of bodily fluids and DNA samples are in place precisely so that the chain of evidence remains intact, and therefore beyond question. Weakening this chain weakens the justice system.
The second policy is the Instant ASBO:
Scottish Labour this week revealed plans to create new ‘instant ASBOs’ to allow the police to take immediate action against the small minority who disrespect and undermine our communities, without having to go through the normal court process. The tough new measure will be available to use by new community policing teams and will stay in place until the offender can convince a court that they have changed and will not offend again.
This is a 180 degree reversal of the “innocent until proven guilty” principle. It is true that methods for establishing law and order could be made more efficient, but eliminating the very principles of law upon which our system is founded is the wrong solution to the problem. Its like being asked to solve a mathematical equation, and simply changing the answer to fit your workings out.
Laws with integrity, which everyone perceives to be fair and just, form bonds that keep communities together. What is so tragic about these proposals is that they will undoubtedly be subjected to their first test in those poor and ethnic minority and communities that (the politicians keep telling us) need a little more social cohesion. The first instant ASBO will not be issued on the red granite streets of leafy Newington, but on the grey concrete schemes of Sighthill. These policies will experience their first malfunction among the under-privileged youths that Labour is so eager to help. They will breed indignation and a sense of injustice long before anyone feels safe, free, or empowered.
If we can rely on anything in 2007, it is that the dismal state of political debate we now have in this country will continue. Philip Webster in The Times reports on the latest example of vacuous thinking:
The Government is to recruit 100 people to help miniters to shape policies on the public services for the next decade … The people, selected by market research organisations as a cross-section representative of the population, will be asked to put themselves in the shoes of the Government’s decision makers
The most terrible irony of this policy, is that it will propagate the problem it has clearly been devised to counter – that of a disconnection between ‘ordinary’ (whatever that means) voters, and the politicians who rule us. At its core, the idea assumes that politicians are not ordinary people, and necessarily so. This might be true on some levels, but if we have reached the stage where a politician is someone who, by definition, cannot know what ordinary people want, then I fear for our salvation.
True, there are policy-wonks and journalists, residents of the fabled ‘Westminster Village’, who have become MPs, but there are also plenty of politicians on the green benches who have also lived in what we might call ‘the real world’ (indeed, no MP would ever claim that this was not true of them).
Has the idea that our political representative should be somehow, well, representative of our views, gone out of fashion? I have always assumed that each MP had his or her ready-made focus group: We call them constituencies, and their members are a perfect representation of the public, a better barometer than anything emulated by market-research companies.
Picking a tiny group of people to advise ministers would seem to by-pass the in-built ‘sovereignty’ of the constituents. The views of the latter group are trumped by those of the former, and I forsee a situation where a stamp of approval from this advisory committee of ordinary people is taken as a sign of a successful policy… regardless of whether the policy has done any good in the real world. This would be typical. If public services are now orientated to the meeting of targets which signal success, rather than actually delivering successful services… it is somehow apt that this same, brain-dead principle is also applied to the act of governing itself.
How depressing. We elect politicians precisely so they can govern. We expect them to make decisions based on what they think our best interests are. In fact, making decisions is the only thing we ask them to do. Asking approval from a cabal of annointed wise men implies that those who currently hold ministerial posts lack the confidence to carry out this one task! If that is the case, the solution to the problem is to employ (i.e. elect) someone else who can do the job themselves, without outsourcing the task to an unelected panel.
Finally, the policy overlooks the crucial possibility that what is popular is not always what is right. Will a minister always take the advice of the panel? If so, then we have a serious democratic crisis on our hands. If not (and we already know they will not) then they are essentially just another group of unelected advisors. Why bother?
There is a horrible ‘meta’ level to this entire idea. It is as if someone in a focus group somewhere has suggested that “giving the public more of a say” would be a good idea, and this policy has been devised on that basis. It has not been created to actually influence policy, just to give the appearance that the government is in touch, and listening. If the government wishes to achieve this impression, it could do so much more effectively through parliament, its MPs and their constituents. As an added bonus, the general public may actually get to have more of a say in how their services are delivered. No extra layer is necessary.
Labour MP Austin Mitchell has a weblog. He has a ‘general ramblings’ spot, where he writes a light-hearted. His latest entry chronicles a set of missed divisions because he has forgotten ‘Whip-speak’, and finishes thus:
Having seen how much David Blunkett has got for his diaries I am doing mine for posterity. Please help me find something interesting to do. Any offers of seduction, sex, scandal, drugs, rock and roll, even promotion, would make life interesting.
I’ll tell you what, Austin. How about actually voting for the debate on the Iraq war, instead of just signing the Early Day Motion which proposed that debate? Or did you also miss that vote because you don’t understand ‘Whip-speak’? Instead of attempting to make money as the next Alan Coren, you could actually be holding the government to account, something that you are already being paid to do. Now that would be really interesting.